Davinci sharpening thoughts

[David Kudell]

Looking for some advice on sharpening in Resolve. Is it something commonly done? I am outputting in 4K and it will be shown on 84" screens. How is the sharpening quality in Resolve?

 

[jake blackstone]

Not great. It's more like coring, but with nothing else, in a pinch it does the job. I suggest not just apply the sharpening over the whole image, but first use Lum keyer and apply sharpening only to dark areas.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Yep, what Jake says. Be very careful about what sharpening does to specular highlights -- those can go into clipping very quickly. To me, any sharpening has to be done on a shot-by-shot basis, not a "one-size-fits-all" setting, because the results are unpredictable and depend heavily on contrast, lighting, color-correction, and the nature of the shot.

 

[Robert Ruffo New]

If you are concerned about ultimate quality use something else. If you are in a hurry SMALL amounts can be OK.

 

[David Kudell]

Thank you for the insight. I will be very selective. I am also isolating the Luminance (Y) channel in Resolve 10, which helps as well.

 

[D Fuller]

Not great. It's more like coring, but with nothing else, in a pinch it does the job. I suggest not just apply the sharpening over the whole image, but first use Lum keyer and apply sharpening only to dark areas.

Jake, what is coring? It's a term I have heard occasionally, but never really understood.

 

[jake blackstone]

Jake, what is coring? It's a term I have heard occasionally, but never really understood.

I used the term coring as more of a descriptive term, than a technical term. When I said coring, I meant the sharpening, that was used on old tube TV cameras to sharpen the images on worn out tubes. It always appeared over processed and not very pleasing, but if you had Plumbicon tubes, that were past it's prime you had no choice, but to keep increasing coring to compensate for the loss of sharpness. To me coring is the most blunt sharpening tool of all. It doesn't discriminate and that is why when you use sharpening in Resolve the whole pictures gets very electronic, noisy and not very pleasant. Anyone can compare that to Unsharp Mask controls in Photoshop. You have way more controls over your image and you can get decent sharpened images with the Unsharp mask without destroying your images. I'm very spoiled in this respect, as I get to use my FilmMaster, that has the best noise reduction as well as the best sharpening tools. It's not just the incredible sharpening tools with all of the controls you'd expect from the high end software, but even more interesting it has a filter, which is called Aperture. Basically it works as an opposite of OLPF. I usually run it on Red material, as Red is known to be quite aggressive with it's OLPF and the result is simply stunning. It's like you lift a clear film from your images. Or I have another filter, which is called Aliasing, which works the other way around. If you have aliasing from something like 5D, just use the filter and use the tuning to tune out the bad portion of the images. Resolve is very good professional software, but it has a long way to go, before it can be compared to other top grading software.

 

[jake blackstone]

Thank you for the insight. I will be very selective. I am also isolating the Luminance (Y) channel in Resolve 10, which helps as well.

You can also use sharpening tools in OFX Sapphire plug-ins. They are quite a bit better, than built in sharpening tools in Resolve.

 

[Corey_O]

Jake,

Whats the price tag for FilmMaster? (ballpark)

 

[jake blackstone]

Jake,

Whats the price tag for FilmMaster? (ballpark)

$100k

 

[Robert Ruffo New]

$100k

Sadly, grading sessions with an experienced colorist inc. the suite are now about $120 an hour in many markets. It would take almost 1000 billable hours just to break even on the machine, let alone the rent, the displays, the marketing costs, the taxes, electricity, opportunity loss on the money, etc. I don't think there are many shops out there who could consider that a safe bet anymore. Not sure how many of these suites they sell anymore, especially since not as good, but still very good alternatives are 99% cheaper.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Jake, what is coring? It's a term I have heard occasionally, but never really understood.

I look upon coring as the threshold of where the enhancement / aperture correction circuits kick in, affecting the specific frequency involved. For those of us who grew up transfering film for decades, aperture correction was generally the pre-correction sharpening (said to make up for optical losses in the scan), and then enhancement was the post-correction sharpening at the end of the signal flow. Coring was kind of the coarse control on which specific frequencies the circuit would grab. Nowadays, enhancement is much more selective and can grab dark scenes, mids, highlights, red-channel only, blue-channel only, green-channel only, luminance-channel only, or various combinations... plus you can window or key it and and just confine the enhancement to a specific part of the image only.

Info here: http://cinematography.net/edited-pages/CML-HDTV Coring.htm

I personally think enhancement is risky except in really tough situations. More often, we're trying to selectively soften​ the picture to help an actor who's beset with wrinkles, bags under their eyes, or other problems, using NR, Blur, Mist, or very careful combinations of them.

Sadly, grading sessions with an experienced colorist inc. the suite are now about $120 an hour in many markets. It would take almost 1000 billable hours just to break even on the machine, let alone the rent, the displays, the marketing costs, the taxes, electricity, opportunity loss on the money, etc. I don't think there are many shops out there who could consider that a safe bet anymore. Not sure how many of these suites they sell anymore, especially since not as good, but still very good alternatives are 99% cheaper.

You can structure the purchase of a lot of broadcast gear by doing a 5-year lease. Rank, DaVinci, Sony, Panasonic, Philips, and many other companies did this for years, often with 0% loans. If you could pay for a $500,000 color corrector for $10K a month, trust me, you could make many times that in the 1990s. Not today. (And now a color-correction system like that would sell for $300 on eBay, sadly.)

When I worked for one very large post house in the 1980s and 1990s, one manager told me they needed to gross $75,000 per day just in order to pay all the overhead (!!!). We had 150 employees, so 99% of the time, we made far more than that because of all the work we were doing at the time.

Today's color-correction market is a very different beast. The plummeting cost of devices like Smoke, Resolve, plus the relatively low cost of IT infrastructure, make it a lot more affordable. $100K today would buy you a complete Resolve suite plus a reasonable monitor, DaVinci control surface, and 100TB of fast 10gE storage, plus all the amenities. My observation is that this has torpedoed companies who are still struggling to pay off much more-costly hardware-based systems.

There was a time when HD color-correction was routinely going for $750/hour circa 2004-2005 or so. Nowadays, I'm guessing it's not even half that, depending on the talent and complexity of the project. Bear in mind that if you get an experienced colorist, you might be able to do the job in half or even 1/3 the time that it would take with a lesser colorist, so the cost savings with a cheaper facility might not necessarily be a bargain.

 

[David Kudell]

Another question - Are people turning off their Rocket card in Resolve before doing final renders out? I was reading on the other thread how people prefer the software debayer.

Is there a way to choose software only in the render settings or do I have to uncheck "use rocket" in the preference pane?

 

[Marc Wielage]

Another question - Are people turning off their Rocket card in Resolve before doing final renders out? I was reading on the other thread how people prefer the software debayer.

I would render out a 5-minute test segment using each workflow path and compare them in projection on a big screen. I run up against deadlines so often, software debayering can be a real downer on a long, involved project. One minor problem can stop a bunch of renders in a queue, particularly if you've already gone home for the day.

 

[Robert Ruffo New]

I look upon coring as the threshold of where the enhancement / aperture correction circuits kick in, affecting the specific frequency involved. For those of us who grew up transfering film for decades, aperture correction was generally the pre-correction sharpening (said to make up for optical losses in the scan), and then enhancement was the post-correction sharpening at the end of the signal flow. Coring was kind of the coarse control on which specific frequencies the circuit would grab. Nowadays, enhancement is much more selective and can grab dark scenes, mids, highlights, red-channel only, blue-channel only, green-channel only, luminance-channel only, or various combinations... plus you can window or key it and and just confine the enhancement to a specific part of the image only.

Info here: http://cinematography.net/edited-pages/CML-HDTV%20Coring.htm

I personally think enhancement is risky except in really tough situations. More often, we're trying to selectively soften​ the picture to help an actor who's beset with wrinkles, bags under their eyes, or other problems, using NR, Blur, Mist, or very careful combinations of them.



You can structure the purchase of a lot of broadcast gear by doing a 5-year lease. Rank, DaVinci, Sony, Panasonic, Philips, and many other companies did this for years, often with 0% loans. If you could pay for a $500,000 color corrector for $10K a month, trust me, you could make many times that in the 1990s. Not today. (And now a color-correction system like that would sell for $300 on eBay, sadly.)

When I worked for one very large post house in the 1980s and 1990s, one manager told me they needed to gross $75,000 per day just in order to pay all the overhead (!!!). We had 150 employees, so 99% of the time, we made far more than that because of all the work we were doing at the time.

Today's color-correction market is a very different beast. The plummeting cost of devices like Smoke, Resolve, plus the relatively low cost of IT infrastructure, make it a lot more affordable. $100K today would buy you a complete Resolve suite plus a reasonable monitor, DaVinci control surface, and 100TB of fast 10gE storage, plus all the amenities. My observation is that this has torpedoed companies who are still struggling to pay off much more-costly hardware-based systems.

There was a time when HD color-correction was routinely going for $750/hour circa 2004-2005 or so. Nowadays, I'm guessing it's not even half that, depending on the talent and complexity of the project. Bear in mind that if you get an experienced colorist, you might be able to do the job in half or even 1/3 the time that it would take with a lesser colorist, so the cost savings with a cheaper facility might not necessarily be a bargain.

I agree, but getting clients to pay that money is another matter in 2013. I find such a high price for a system simply does not take into account the new economic realities of post in the vast majority of markets. So… Great code gets used by only a tiny number of users. Kind of a waste.

 

[jake blackstone]

I agree, but getting clients to pay that money is another matter in 2013. I find such a high price for a system simply does not take into account the new economic realities of post in the vast majority of markets. So… Great code gets used by only a tiny number of users. Kind of a waste.

It's too bad, that only a few get to use Master Primes or Leica lenses. What a waste of great glass…
Or this only applies to software? Because in 2013 any software should be either free or under $1K?

 

[Zeb B]

Just downloaded DVR 12 Studio. Was wondering if anyone had an update to how best Unsharp Mask footage in the DVR timeline. Is there a 3rd party plugin for this? Not seeing anything in the app inself

 

[Mark Toia]

Looking for some advice on sharpening in Resolve. Is it something commonly done? I am outputting in 4K and it will be shown on 84" screens. How is the sharpening quality in Resolve?

AE And Premier has the best sharpener going.

 

[jake blackstone]

AE And Premier has the best sharpener going.

Define the best?

 

[jake blackstone]

Just downloaded DVR 12 Studio. Was wondering if anyone had an update to how best Unsharp Mask footage in the DVR timeline. Is there a 3rd party plugin for this? Not seeing anything in the app inself

There is no update on sharpening in Resolve. it's the same crappy, noise inducing sharpening as you'd find in the original Resolve. You may look into OFX Sapphire. But even that is just marginally better. If you want a true professional quality sharpening, then you may look into using DVO Sharpen with Nucoda. But that is not $1K anymore:blush5: