Neat Video & Neat Image community

NI seems pretty slow to me on a full size file from a 20D. I have a G4 867 dual which handles just about everything I throw at it. Do you have plans to speed this up?

Dear Cindy,

How long does it take to process one image on your Mac and how large is the image in pixels? Please let me know these two figures and I will check whether the time is normal for Neat Image or it is too long.

Thank you,
Vlad

NITeam wrote:Dear Cindy,

How long does it take to process one image on your Mac and how large is the image in pixels? Please let me know these two figures and I will check whether the time is normal for Neat Image or it is too long.

Thank you,
Vlad

Vlad,

IMAGE: 3504 x 2336 pixels - RAW
TIME: 1min 17sec

Thank you for the figures.

I have just made an estimation: on a Pentium4 1400MHz such an image would take about 55 sec in Neat Image v4.x for Windows.

So the Mac version of the plug-in runs on your dual G4 867 (the plug-in uses only one G4, we are going to improve that in the next versions) as I would expect. I would say the plug-in even makes more per MHz on your Mac than on Pentium4.

So it is normal.

On the other hand, we always work to make Neat Image faster. The Mac version has just started but the Windows version is available for several years already and we have been making it faster every time from version to version. Last two major updates made it x5 times faster overall. So I hope we will manage to make the Mac version faster too.

Please also understand that noise reduction is a hard task to solve in principle. And there is always a tradeoff between speed and quality. Neat Image is the best in quality and at the same time it is not the worst in speed.

Thank you,
Vlad

Anonymous wrote:IMAGE: 3504 x 2336 pixels - RAW
TIME: 1min 17sec

Ahhhh... I remember the days when it would take NI about nine minutes to process a 6-megapixel image from a D60 on my 800-MHz Pentium III laptop.

file size of 3656x2800 (from Nikon D2X, cropped a bit)

NI V2.2

Mac G4 dual 1.25 (activity monitor shows both processors kicking in)

1 minute 4 seconds

40% y reduction

According to the Activity Monitor, Mac Neat Image seems to use only about 98% of the CPU bandwidth on my dual 2.5 GHz G5. This only keeps the processors half-busy (the maximum would be 200%).

Is this a limitation of Neat Image, Photoshop CS2, or something else? Using one CPU it currently takes about 23 seconds to process a 12-megapixel 16-bit RGB Nikon D2x image.

(Btw, I have a 2.4 GHz PC right next to my Mac, which is running a two-week-long batch job doing the same thing but taking 5.5 minutes per image! I do it this way because the Mac version doesn't automatically select profiles yet.)

The current version of the plug-in only uses one CPU so the system is only half-busy. In the next version, we are going to add multi-processor support so processing will become faster on your system.

Regarding the PC version, it should not take 5.5 min per image if you use the latest version of Neat Image. I would expect under 1 min processing times with such a hardware (I don't know details, just see the CPU frequency).

BTW, we are also working on profile matching for the Mac version so you will be able to do everything with just the Mac version in the not so distant future.

Vlad

I am using the latest version of standalone Neat Image Pro 5.1+ on the PC. Running continuously it does somewhere around 250 images/day (16-bit, 12-megapixel Nikon D2x TIFFs). It also tends to slowly leak memory and run out (on a 1GB machine) after about a week.

There must be something wrong with the software setup on that PC, because NI should work much faster. If you want to fix this please fill out the bug report form to let me know about the hardware/software configuration. And also in the same form, try to describe, as accurately as possible, the Neat Image setup (profiles used, filter presets used, values in Neat Image Options, folder locations, image, ..). I will then try to reproduce and analyze the effect to see what is going wrong.

Thank you,
Vlad