Sharpening

[Ryan Hamblin]

How do you all go about sharpening your footage for 4k master file? Are you using just the sharpen effect in FCPx or are you using specialized software/hardware?

 

[Akin A]

I use Davinci Resolve. It has very precise sharpening.

 

[Marc Wielage]

I would leave it alone. There's always a risk for over-enhancement, which leads to all kinds of problems. To me, 4K should be plenty sharp enough already. And if you try to enhance soft-focus footage, what you wind up with is over-enhanced, noisy, soft footage.

I wind up defocusing far more than I do sharpening, particularly to flatter actors with skin problems, makeup problems, age lines, and so on.

 

[Ryan Hamblin]

All I can say is 4k for 4k is not sharp enough. 6k Down to 4k I've not been too convinced it gives much else to the image. Most movies, shows, blu ray whatever get sharpened. It in almost all situations, other than going for a vintage look, makes things look better. That is at 4k. 1080 I think it's a bad move to sharpen

 

[Phil Holland]

The methods I utilize when dealing with sharpening and finishing are:

- Do nothing
- Down Sample from higher resolution source material
- Sharpen and then down sample to finish resolution
- Sharpen at final resolution after down sampling if necessary

Then there's a bazillion ways to sharpen material and also clean up artifacts. I've done lots and lots of experimenting on this front.

I'll echo Marc's concern about sharpening however. There's too much over sharpened material these days. It looks like rubbish and it's often better off to do nothing at all than to produce something that may contain artifacts.

Sharpening in general is something that requires a deft hand and it's very useful to QC footage on a big screen to really see if you've gone too far.

That all said, if you work material right and sharpening fits the aesthetic desired you can do some pretty rad things. There's lot's of interesting detail in 4K+ captured footage to exploit, especially if that's your intention.

 

[Kristin Stewart]

Great subject. It would be interesting to see some 4K 100% crop details of what look sharp enough, as it's quite subjective.

Kristin

 

[David Battistella]

I rarely sharpen anything but If I do it is the very last thing that gets applied to an image. The reason I capture everything at 24P and 180 degree shutter is precisely to distinguish it from that harsh 1080i looking videos image with a 59.94 timebase.

The Dragon or any RED camera can capture really sharp looking stuff if you set it to 59.94 timebase and 30FPS. Part of the perceived sharpness/softness is motion blur that we are looking for at 24P.

Maybe some other cameras and DSLR's activate internal circuitry to put NR and sharpening on images tied to higher ISO's. What they are doing is "taking care of your image for you" at the higher ISO's etc. What RED is doing is leaving the image in tact, allowing you to see what is going on and choosing your path to sharpen/noise reduce that image. Not unlike any film style workflow.

One thing people often say about film is that it was so forgiving. It was also pretty unforgiving. Like if you exposed a Kodak stock in the light of your kitchen at around midnight and sent it to the lab, i doubt it would be even close to as acceptable as the image a Dragon sensor can create under the same circumstances.

Trust me, sometimes we do not really understand how good things are now.

I'm not trying to take away from the fact that some images need a bit of sharpening, but with this much resolution and downsampling, I think that sharpening only really needs to be considered for 4k finish, and not from four inches from the screen, but more like a viewing distance.

For me, the "tack sharpness" of digital photography is great for products and other applications, but not always for motion pictures. All depends what you want to achieve.

Cheers

 

[Björn Benckert]

Matchbox has a some quite good appturecorrection nodes that works well. it´s all depending on the source, to say that nothing needs sharpening is not really right I think, when matching different resolutions and such good sharpening can help out a lot for example 3k clips next to 6k clips in a HD timeline can be helped by a bit of sharpening. Preferbly the shaprpening should be done in native resolution before downsampling but then offcourse you need to look at the result further down in the tree to make sure it all matches at the final resolution.

 

[Ryan Hamblin]

Thanks so much Phil. I agree about qc on big screen. We always view on 60" 4k screen when finishing projects. I was more seeing if it's better to do outside of fcpx or if the sharpening in software is fine. My business partner does all our work that happens outside fcpx but sometimes I am finishing some of our edits and my knowledge base is just in fcpx so my hands are somewhat tied to coloring/noise reduction/sharpening in program. all of our material that we deliver in 4k gets noise reduction and sharpening, but 1080 we never touch.

The methods I utilize when dealing with sharpening and finishing are:

- Do nothing
- Down Sample from higher resolution source material
- Sharpen and then down sample to finish resolution
- Sharpen at final resolution after down sampling if necessary

Then there's a bazillion ways to sharpen material and also clean up artifacts. I've done lots and lots of experimenting on this front.

I'll echo Marc's concern about sharpening however. There's too much over sharpened material these days. It looks like rubbish and it's often better off to do nothing at all than to produce something that may contain artifacts.

Sharpening in general is something that requires a deft hand and it's very useful to QC footage on a big screen to really see if you've gone too far.

That all said, if you work material right and sharpening fits the aesthetic desired you can do some pretty rad things. There's lot's of interesting detail in 4K+ captured footage to exploit, especially if that's your intention.

 

[Ryan Hamblin]

Bjorn what are your thoughts on sharpening 3k when your having to match 4k footage for a 4k delivery?

Matchbox has a some quite good appturecorrection nodes that works well. it´s all depending on the source, to say that nothing needs sharpening is not really right I think, when matching different resolutions and such good sharpening can help out a lot for example 3k clips next to 6k clips in a HD timeline can be helped by a bit of sharpening. Preferbly the shaprpening should be done in native resolution before downsampling but then offcourse you need to look at the result further down in the tree to make sure it all matches at the final resolution.

 

[Hal Long]

I've used many different sharpening tools from FXPX and Adobe plugins to Resolve. There may be better tools out there, but the speed that Resolve delivers is hard to beat for both softening and sharpening as it offers instant feedback on good GPUs. That said, with good lighting (backlight / edge) and sharp focus I find that I rarely sharpen. It falls into the same category as diffusion. While I love the look of a nice Soft FX or Hollywood Black Magic, less is almost always more for sharpening and softening. And then there are your lenses… how sharp are they?

 

[Phil Holland]

Thanks so much Phil. I agree about qc on big screen. We always view on 60" 4k screen when finishing projects. I was more seeing if it's better to do outside of fcpx or if the sharpening in software is fine. My business partner does all our work that happens outside fcpx but sometimes I am finishing some of our edits and my knowledge base is just in fcpx so my hands are somewhat tied to coloring/noise reduction/sharpening in program. all of our material that we deliver in 4k gets noise reduction and sharpening, but 1080 we never touch.

Interesting. I don't particularly have "one way" for everything. Seems like each job demands something different.

Back when I worked at R&H and was dealing with film as well as matching various digital systems to film there were a lot of up scaling, down sampling, and sharpening going on. Just part of what was done really. Even 2K plates were up scaled and sharpened to 4K before recording out on the laser recorder. For digital systems we also applied grain obviously.

For me there are now pretty interesting sharpening tools in Premiere Pro, FCPX, and Resolve. However, plugin suites like GenArts Sapphire and compositing packages tend to have some really nice options.

Great subject. It would be interesting to see some 4K 100% crop details of what look sharp enough, as it's quite subjective.

Here's a couple things I've posted while tinkering a bit with sharpening:

Ahoy friends,

I've been up to no good coming up with various ways to develop Red Dragon material. Some methods purely through REDcine-X Pro and some methods that I would define more or less as time consuming witchcraft.

There is oddly no real right or wrong answer here, but I am curious as to which you prefer in terms of the general aesthetic. A couple of these methods involve some hefty processing time per frame, but I'm more or less curious at what you guys like to look at.

These are 100% crops from a portion of a DCI 4K image.

A:


B:


C:


D:


E:


F:


G:


H:



If you have a moment this evening I'd love to know which you prefer and if there's a reason why. For the curious I finished this particular piece with technique "F".

Thanks!

This post also has some RED Mysterium-X sharpening examples:

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?102275-Red-Epic-X-5232-quot-Spike-quot&p=1230575&viewfull=1#post1230575

 

[Kristin Stewart]

Thanks, Phil, much appreciated. Well, A has my vote ;-)

 

[Ryan Hamblin]

Thanks Phil for everything. We tend to do a lot of the same type of work. I also kinda have a lookas a director I suppose. So 90 percent of our campus s work is my stuff and the. 10 or so percent is outside post work which yes does have different requirements per job.

Are all of those examples sharpened or some with. I sharpening?

 

[Phil Holland]

Thanks, Phil, much appreciated. Well, A has my vote ;-)

Well the good news is that A was the straight out of the camera image. In this case 5.5K scaled to DCI 4K.

Thanks Phil for everything. We tend to do a lot of the same type of work. I also kinda have a lookas a director I suppose. So 90 percent of our campus s work is my stuff and the. 10 or so percent is outside post work which yes does have different requirements per job.

Are all of those examples sharpened or some with. I sharpening?

All of them but A utilize some sort of processing method. Some special sauce ones. G and H were ADD + special sauce. B & C were sharpened via REDCINE-X PRO.

F was advanced processing that also employed some chromatic blurring to handle edges that are in and out of focus. These examples sort of show that effect with and without the special sauce sharpening:

Nothing


F - No Sharp


F - Sharp

You'll notice that the edge of the eye glass frame left has a bit of color to it. This is due to shooting the T2 lens around T2.8 or T4 and that edge rolling a bit off the focus plane. Which is more common in close-ups btw. Past 6 feet this is often less common. Stopped down to T5.6 it also would have been minimized.

 

[Ryan Hamblin]

I agree when coming from 5.5k or 6k with low compression that sharpening is not really of need. More talking specifically scarlet 4k and 3k for 4k delivery. At 4k I do not see a massive difference between 4k and 6k on a 60" display but it's still noticeable enough that sharpening the 4k brings it into indistinguishable to my eye. Are there preferred methods of sharpening in fcpx?

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Some images need significant sharpening and there are plenty of ways to do so - props to Phil for his examples. Keep in mind that sharpening of the final deliverable may happen at distro and some codecs enhance edge sharpness by design - PLUS - most people have the sharpness (or similar) settings on their TVs set very high. This is why I agree with being conservative when sharpening - even a small amount of aliasing can end up looking pretty nasty if it's "enhanced" on the road from mastering to viewing.

That said, by choosing the right scaling (downsampling) filter I can usually get enough sharpness with extremely low risk of aliasing artifacts. Lanczos, Mitchell, Bi-Cubic, etc all render a different level of perceived sharpness and most of the time, one of them hits the sweet spot and I can avoid sharpening altogether. YMMV.

Cheers - #19

 

[Marc Wielage]

Some images need significant sharpening and there are plenty of ways to do so - props to Phil for his examples. Keep in mind that sharpening of the final deliverable may happen at distro and some codecs enhance edge sharpness by design - PLUS - most people have the sharpness (or similar) settings on their TVs set very high. This is why I agree with being conservative when sharpening - even a small amount of aliasing can end up looking pretty nasty if it's "enhanced" on the road from mastering to viewing.

Yep, Blair knows what he's talking about.

Note also that after color correction, a lot of images can gain "apparent" sharpness just when contrast is dropped. Sharpness is often very contingent on where the blacks are in the picture, and once an image is "snapped up" in color, it generally appears a lot sharper just by the nature of midtone adjustment. I also think the risk of visible over-enhancement makes this a very dicey choice.

 

[Björn Benckert]

Bjorn what are your thoughts on sharpening 3k when your having to match 4k footage for a 4k delivery?

I for one process most material quite hard, never really liked out of the camera stuff. Normally I have a node tree big as a christmas tree with qualifiers even on shots I thought look really good on the camera screen. But 3k mixed into a 4k timeline... then I would yes most likely try to enhance the 3k footage to match up with the higher resolution material, if it still stood out I would degrade the 4k material around those 3K shots so that it all match up a bit of blur and grain/noise match.