Works well, but slow

This plugin works really well, can improve video noise a lot and the results are very pleasing. However it is slow, very slow. I use multicam a lot and usually apply effects and color correction to each angle to get each camera’s video to look “just right” before starting the editing process. However enabling this plugin before doing the edit is unusable as it is incredibly slow. You cannot realistically do any editing with this effect enabled.

I found that it was best to apply the denoise as the very last step before exporting the final project (I export as master file 1080p then use Compressor to create the final mp4/mov). To give you a sense of what I mean by slow… an ~8 minute 1080p30 project will export master file in about 2-3 minutes without this effect enabled. With the effect enabled between 90 and 120 minutes depending on settings. That is just exporting master file so no compression taking place. I am sure it would be faster if I only needed to denoise a short segment, but as the entire 8 minutes was indoor video I wanted to do the lot.

I observed that during export there is little multithreading going on and the plugin seems to use the graphics co-processor. I wonder if it could be improved by using more of the i7 CPU as well as the GPU as the CPU usage was never above 25%… exporting without the plugin enabled and FCP X would utilize 75% or more of the CPU. This is on a late 2013 iMac, 3.5Ghz i7, 24GB ram, GeForce GTX 780M with 4GB and a 1TB SSD flash drive… as fast a iMac as you can get.

I rate it 4 stars because it works and does its job well, you just need to be patient when it comes time to render or export.

DAK64GLA about Photon Pro