Hi to all you editors.
First a big thanks to many of the pros here from whom I have learned so much over the last couple of years. Nick Hope, you’re top of my list, many thanks especially for the FAQ posts, a great help

I shoot with a Canon XF100 which is well known to be noisy in low light. The Neat Video plug-in does a great job of cleaning up the grainy footage, in a word it transforms it!. The down side is that it cripples your rendering speed 2fps max on my slow system. I frequently end up making small changes even after my “final” render (when is it ever final?) and every time I have to wait hours/days (weddings) for VP to crunch through the NV filtering. So I’ve been trying to come up with a better workflow and here it is. It makes extensive use of the Vegasaur extension (worth every penny in my opinion). It basically creates digital intermediates for the noisy clips. No doubt some of you pros have been doing this sort of thing for years but it’s new for me and I’m just sharing it here in case others are in the same boat and looking for a solution. Here’s my new workflow.

Load the original clips in VP (for me that’s MXF/MPEG2/422/50MB/s) and edit as normal.

When the timeline is nearing the picture lock stage ie you know which clips you are going to be using and they’re all on the t/l, open another instance of VP and paste your video tracks into the new project and call it **** De-Noise.veg or whatever.

Get all of the clips that you want to de-noise on one track (doesn’t matter about the order) and apply the NV filter as an event Fx.

Using Vegasaur timeline tools, add regions to each event and name them with “the active take name”.

Using the Vegasaur render tools, batch transcode each region to a digital intermediate file (DI) using the codec of your choice (I’m using the free Magic YUV *.avi codec) and naming them by the region name (there is a macro drop down for this) and output them to a separate folder on your project drive (make sure you have the space, files are big approx. 1GB/min). This is the time consuming bit, but the beauty of it is that you can just leave to run in the background and carry on editing in the main project. You will end up with a folder with clean clips with the same name as the original clips but with an *.avi (likely) extension.

When batch rendering is finished (overnight or maybe a couple days if your clips are long), open the main project and use the Vegasaur batch media replace tool to replace your noisy original clips with the cleaned up DI files, takes a few secs and you carry on  editing with the new files. For me I now have on the t/l a mix of original cam files (MXF) and DIs (avi).

The beauty of this is that you only have to render the NV Fx once and you can do the batch transcode at any time in the edit and in the background to suit your convenience. My project renders will now take a more reasonable time.

I guess it’s a bit like a proxy workflow but you can do it at a late stage in editing if you wish and its virtually all automated.

Hope this may be of help to other NV users particularly those who have low spec hardware.