Inner Circle

And by chance I happened to be testing all three a couple of weeks ago on some SD BetaCamSP footage, animation and live action. The goal was to create the best up-res to progressive HD of the footage. At first I was comparing Neat and Resolve and then suddenly FCPX was updated to include it's own noise reduction filter. I found the results very dependent on the footage. I have not had a chance to try these programs on HD video yet.
- The Resolve 'Supersize' option in the file attributes dialog box did the best job of reducing tape/camera noise (not tape dropout) and returning a surprising amount of detail to faces. You could be tricked into thinking the original was shot on 16mm. The colors in drawn animation looked great with all noise in colors flattened without looking posterized. For this footage adding the Resolve noise filter did not improve the footage much, the SuperSize filter did a better job on SD footage even with the six limited, preset options in the filter. The Supersize filter does not seem to do anything to HD footage on an HD timeline. Rendering is reasonably fast. Deinterlacing was fair.
- Neat was very good with the animation with more options to adjust the parameters as far as my experience with Resolve goes. I accept my temporary ignorance if I am missing a feature in Resolve. The problem initially before the FCPX update was that deinterlacing in FCPX softened the image where a certain amount of detail was not retrievable without making the footage look weird in HD. The live action footage looked good but it was a tossup if the time taken to render it was worth it.
- The new FCPX noise filter is curiously very similar to the Resolve Supersize filter in operation (only six preset options in two sets of three). And just like the Supersize filter, it does a very good job with the SD footage I threw at it. Not as good but close. VERY SLOW to render on my particular computer, a 2013 MacPro, but I have heard it's faster than Neat on a more modern Mac.
By far, the FCPX de-interlace filter does the best job of removing interlace jitter and aliasing. The animation I was up-resing needed that badly for HD and one live action interview from 1991, the subject was wearing a horizontally striped shirt which neither Neat or Resolve could stop pulsating. Unfortunately it's either on or off in FCPX, no adjustments like in Resolve.
After rendering different test combos I made the judgment that using the new FCPX noise reducer with the FCPX deinterlace option was the best choice for the animation even though I lost a little clarity over the Resolve result. The live action is a long term project and a final choice will be down the line. I might run footage where the interlacing isn't a problem thru Resolve and the rest in FCPX, a decision for later.

__________________
William Hohauser - New York City
Producer/Edit/Camera/Animation