Denoising Canon Raw Light with Neat Video - Export Times

The Canon C200 is a great camera, especially shooting in Canon Raw Light. However, it can have a noisy image at the native ISO of 800 and above. I often run my footage through Neat Video, which does a great job of cleaning up the noise. Unfortunately, it takes a few hours and is pretty resource-intensive so I can’t really do any editing work while I’m running these exports, even if I export with Adobe Media Encoder.

I wanted to see if I could improve the export times, so I made all of the tweaks recommended by NeatVideo. I then recorded a 1-minute clip at ISO 800 and applied both NR noise reduction and a standard Rec709 LUT to it in Premiere CC 2020 before exporting.

Here are the specs of my main editing workstation:

And the results.

Footage on connected MSATA drive (SolidPod, straight from the camera)
Noise Reduction - Alexa LUT - Export to ProResHQ on Desktop
7:50

Footage on connected MSATA drive (SolidPod, straight from the camera)
NO Noise Reduction - Alexa LUT - Export to ProResHQ on Desktop
2:49

Footage on OWC SSD
Noise Reduction - Alexa LUT - Export to ProResHQ on OWC SSD
7:12

Footage on OWC SSD
Noise Reduction (after optimizing with Neat Video tool) - Alexa LUT - Export to ProResHQ on OWC SSD
5:55

Footage on Desktop
Noise Reduction (after optimizing with Neat Video tool) - Alexa LUT - Export to ProResHQ on Desktop
5:18

Footage on Desktop
Noise Reduction (after optimizing with Neat Video tool) - Alexa LUT - Export to ProRes422 on Desktop
5:18

I also tried it on my PC laptop (MSI Predator with GTX 1060):

Footage on connected MSATA drive
Noise Reduction (after optimizing with Neat Video tool) - Alexa LUT - Export to ProResHQ Desktop
16:39

And finally, I did a test with some footage from the new Canon C70, which may have a clean enough image not to warrant noise reduction. But I did have a noisier nighttime shot at ISO 1600 or 3200

Footage on Desktop
Noise Reduction (after optimizing with Neat Video tool) - Alexa LUT - Export to ProResHQ on Desktop
5:54

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Conclusions: The Neat Video Performance tool made a bigger difference than anything else. Also, working locally and not from an external drive also helped. Exporting to ProRes422 didn’t have much benefit over ProResHQ in terms of render time. And denoising the C70 footage took longer than the Canon Raw Light footage from the C200 (though it does appear much cleaner at ISO 800).

And the award for most pleasing grain structure goes to...

I shot some comparison footage on a rainy day. I used the same lighting for each shot. All cameras were set to ISO 800 and were fitted with the same 50mm Canon lens (except for the Red, which had a 50mm Nikkor AIS). I added a noise-popping curves adjustment.

Red One MX - Redcode 36, 4K HD, Red’s Chromatic LUT

Canon C200 - Canon Raw Light, C-Log2 with a Rec709 LUT

Canon EOS-R 4K - Internal 8-Bit C-Log, C-Log to Rec709 LUT

Canon 5Diii with Magic Lantern Raw - No adjustments, just enlarged from 1080P to 4K and converted to ProRes4444

My big discovery is that the 9-year-old Red One MX has the most pleasing noise structure of any of my cameras. This old sensor continues to surprise me.