Best Sharpener Tool for FCPX

[Jeff Kirkland]

Personally, I just publish the Unsharp Mask filter from Motion.

[Sascha Engel]

Hi Jeff,

Does that mean you send each Clip on the timeline separately to Motion?

Thanx.

Greetings,

Sascha

Sascha Engel
KINO KITCHEN Studio
https://kinokitchen.foliohd.com/
http://www.youtube.com/taikang

[Michael Hadley]

No doubt that old footage is very grainy, too, right? You can get rid of video noise AND sharpen your images with the denoiser from Neat Video. It’s $99 and it works terrifically. You do have to customize the setting to include the sharpening, though, but it’s pretty easy.

Don’t be put off by Neat’s website–which is a throwback to the ’90s. The plug in is top notch.

As well, and in addition, you can also throw on the sharpen filter that’s free in FCPX. That and Neat Video make a good combination.

I used it recently on some very low lights scenes on this project with excellent results:

https://youtu.be/LU3aoDqfyDI

Good luck.

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[Jeff Kirkland]

No I mean that I open Motion, create a new FCPX effect and publish the unsharp mask filter back to FCPX so I can use it there.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Mark Suszko]

If they are old stills that can’t be re-scanned, what I might do is turn them into PDF’s because scaling up vector art looks better than scaling raster art. Going a step farther, there’s a stand-alone software (Genuine Fractals) that uses fractals to create “lossless” blow-ups with more *apparent* sharpness than what you can do in Photoshop. Your mileage may vary.

Once in p-shop or in the timeline, you can stack multiple identical layers and goose the apparent sharpness more by working on changes to the blending modes and separate color channels for each layer.

[Sascha Engel]

Not stills, old two inch video Tapes in SD, Uprezed to HD.

[Sascha Engel]

I actually have NEAT video…and yes, the website is old…but more like 80s. 😉
But the kind of grain of the old 2inch Tapes, seems to be hard to deal with for NEAT.
I also thought the Sharpen Filter inside FCPX is pretty good.
Just wanted to make sure, that it is – and get some other opinions.

Sascha

[Michael Hadley]

Yes, I do think the X filter is good. And like I said, I like it combination with the sharpen in Neat. Good luck!

[Sascha Engel]

Well, after several tests, it is same than original: The Sharpen Filter, makes the picture more crisp, but more noisy, and NEAT takes the extra noise out and softens the image. The result looks the same than the untreated footage. 😉

Sascha

[Jeff Kirkland]

Did you try the Unsharp Mask? It’s not the same effect as sharpen. I use it all the time on slightly soft footage.

Photoshop can also process movie files so it might be worth giving some of the sharpening tools in there a try.