Noise into color banding: will 32bit f.p. help in Vegas Pro?

questions about practical use of Neat Video, examples of use
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MoldCAD
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Joined: Thu Aug 19, 2010 8:39 pm

Noise into color banding: will 32bit f.p. help in Vegas Pro?

Post by MoldCAD »

First time poster here, and a new NV user in Vegas 9 Pro !

First impressions are OK, even though it's sooooo slow :( With my EX1 or nanoFlash mxf files (full HD in 4:2:2, at 35 Mbps and up), it renders at some 2 fps on my (little old) QX6700...

A couple of questions:

1. In my result clips I can see occasional color banding which are not present in the original, 100 Mbps 4:2:2, L-GoP files. I'm told the noise acted as sort of dithering thus effectively preventing the color banding, so removing the noise caused banding to show. I tried and converted a particularly noisy clip to 10-bit Sony YUV intermediate, and tried NeatVideo on that...

Well - it looks to me NV cannot take advantage of the 10 bit color: in its configuration preview window, the frame is still reported as 1920x1080, 8-bit RGB.

So, does it make sense to use a 10bit intermediate?

2. Will it make a difference if I set my Vegas project to 32 bit floating point?

Thanks,

Piotr
NVTeam
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Post by NVTeam »

It may have sense to use 10bit intermediate, but I recommend to directly test that both ways, with and without 10bit intermediate.

Using 32-bit floating point in Vegas will most likely make processing much slower but will not make Neat Video results different.
I recommend to check the output compression codec. In my experience, output compression is the most frequent source of banding. Try to output uncompressed frames to check that.

Vlad
MoldCAD
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Joined: Thu Aug 19, 2010 8:39 pm

Post by MoldCAD »

Thanks Vlad; I'm currently testing all the solutions you mentioned.

However, you didn't answer my question:

- in the NV "Configure" window, the clip is always reported as "Frame: 1920x1080, 8-bit RGB" - no matter if I am using an 8bit clip (4:2:0 EX or 4:2:2 nanoFlash), or a 10bit, 4:2:2 intermediate (like the Sony 10bit YUV avi).

Why is that?

Thanks,

Piotr
NVTeam
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Joined: Thu Sep 01, 2005 4:12 pm
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Post by NVTeam »

Neat Video receives a 8-bit frame from Vegas. Vegas currently sends only 8-bit data to video filter plug-ins. When the original data is 10-bit, Vegas converts it to 8-bit representation on the fly and that is what Neat Video gets and displays.

Vlad
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