Why is AE "Remove Grain" so slow to render???

[#1]

I really like the results with the "Remove Grain" filter in AE, but I regret I was unable to use it due to the render times. Without the effect applied my 30 minute 1080p project took about 6 minutes to render on an AMD 3900X with 32GB of memory. With the Remove Grain filter applied it was guessing at 30 hours...

Maybe it is just me but that seems like an excessively huge jump in time.

Doing the math, at a frame rate of 29.97fps my 30 minute video has 53,946 frames. A render time of 30 hours equates to 2.002 seconds to render each frame. With a 1080p frame size that seems excessively long or am I crazy? Shouldn't it take a couple of milliseconds to render some grain removal?

Makes me thankful I sprung for the EOS R5, it has no grain even shooting indoors in a poorly lit school auditorium. Unfortunately my B cam does have grain so I wanted the footage to match a little better between that camera and the ultra clean output of the R5. Maybe recording at 4k and downsizing the video will give better results in a reasonable amount of time?

Other possibilities are that I need a new video card. Currently I just have a 980TI. I know it is a bit old but are the new cards really all that much faster? I was never impressed with Nvidia/AMD and their video card "improvements" over the past few generations. The supposed performance bumps tend to go missing in lots of applications. And if I'm being honest, I haven't seen visuals in a game that were really all that better than the best of the 980TI days. Still waiting for real time radiosity, maybe it is not doable in this universe. No idea. I had a thought recently that if reality was a video game it would have to be a very powerful computer to calculate everything. But then I realized if it was a trained machine learning AI it wouldn't need to calculate anything, it could just invent scenes on the fly and make them look real just like an artist would. An odd thought. 

Anyway, thanks for any help you can provide.

[#2]

This is a plugin that analyses multiple frames when you turn on temporal filtering. In fact you can choose how many frames it looks at to analyse the noise level. As a result it's very slow. It's also a pretty good noise reduction plugin. There are others available to purchase from ReVision FX, BorisFX and Red Giant. One of the fastest is Denoiser III from Red Giant. I suspect though it does not use temporal filtering. It's good for light denoising. AE built-in 'remove grain' and 'DE:noise' from RevisionFX are (I believe) the best. albeit both are slow.

[#3]

Interesting you should ask if "remove grain" would be that much different with a GPU vastly improved from your current (and rather aged) one. I'm a contributing author over at mixinglight.com and my "beat" is color correction/grading in Premiere. So I spend a lot of time talking with, Slack, and reading/studying colorists and their gear and problems and solutions.

And I am on the LiftGammaGain (LGG) forum a lot, again ... keeping up with colorist issues and solutions.

A very common practice for colorists to test GPUs ... is to time noise removal processing. Because that is heavily dependent on your GPU's capabilities. A lot of times, they're considering say whether one 3080 in Resolve will perform with two 2080Ti cards, or the equivalent in AMD cards.

Given the age of your rig, I'm not at all surprised at the render times you're looking at. Given a newer rig, with good SSD drives and a 2080Ti or better, you'd find the render times for de-noising would drop dramatically.

Neil

[#4]

Of course I would assume a faster video card would give me a bump in performance, but would it go from 30 hours to 15 hours, or would it actually enter the realm of reason in the range of 2-3 hours? Not sure I believe a 3080 or AMD equivalent could pull off a 10-15x improvement in time to render.

[#5]

I can suggest to try 3rd party denoiser (freeware ), only drawback is that it's standalone, but it's fast (realtime on your system) and allows saving in intermediate codecs DNxHR/Cineform/Prores. Youtube guide + download:

Free Video Denoiser

https://1drv.ms/f/s!Andr88T403SpapbOPF2tnEGLnQ0

[#6]

My favorite is Neat Video. Windows and Mac versions available. Works in both Pr and Ae.

[#7]

Well, I ended up getting Neat Video pro on a whim, and it worked out ok. Ended up taking about 6hrs to render my clips which is approximately 5x faster than Premiere (30hrs) was showing when attempting to render the AE Remove Grain filter. I just left everything at the default and it turned out fine. Neat Video is good if you don't want to alter the footage at all, while the AE Remove Grain filter can do more to "improve" the look of the video you basically need a super computer to make it a reasonable option.

Thanks everyone for your help!