Best Sharpener Tool for FCPX

[John Rofrano]

[Sascha Engel] “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. ;-)”

You might want to take a look at Boris Continuum Complete Image Restoration Unit. It contains a plug-in called Magic Sharp which gives you extremely fine grain control over what gets sharpened and even includes built-in Noise Suppression. For example you could sharpen the fine details but not sharpen the noise background by adjusting the Threshold of the Fine, Small, Medium, and Course Details settings along with the Noise Suppression setting.

Here is a live Boris FX webinar that I did for them where I demonstrate Magic Sharp at 23:00 minutes into the webinar:

https://www.youtube.com/v/gXugmuTPgTE

This is being demoed on Sony Vegas Pro but the controls work exactly the same in Final Cut Pro X. The webinar is a bit fuzzy because it is being recorded from GotoMeeting and not locally by me (sorry) but you can listen and tell what’s going on.

BCC Image Restoration Unit also includes UpRez which is what I would use to up scale from SD to HD. That also has a simpler Magic Sharp filter built in but if you have already up scaled the video just use the main Magic Sharp plug-in. I’ve even used it to salvage footage that was out of focus. It’s really very good.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[Sascha Engel]

Thanx. I’ll check it out!

[Sascha Engel]

Hi John,

I gave the BCC Unit a try, and it also wasn’t the yellow of the egg.
When I pushed the Sharpener and Noise reduction to the limits,
Where I started to see an improvement in the image, then it looked very artificial and unreal,
Which is for historical archive footage of a museum exhibition of course unacceptable.

In the end we will keep it as is.
It’s not so terrible at all,
I just hoped there was a way to enhance it.

Thanx nevertheless for all the input.

Greetings,

Sascha

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

[Clermond Ferrand]

did you try Highpass filter in Motion?

It’s quite easy to build a sharpener on this basis.
You can build it with two layers with the highpass filter and separate these layers with a luma keyer for bright and dark parts. Works great and more subtle than unsharpening mask

[Kasey Gay]

Hey Clermond,

Sorry for digging out an old thread. Just passing by and found this. Can you elaborate a bit more about using a high pass paired with Luma key? Is that somethingthinf you can publish back into fcpx?

[Sebastian Leitner]

yes you can. but i’ve tested both on 4K footage from a FS7 in a flat profile (no in-cam sharpening).
in the newer versions of FCPX the internal sharpening has improved. were i could clearly see differences between highpass and normal sharpening in say 10.3 flavors, i don’t really anymore in 10.4+ it’s very similar on good footage.

the only thing i can think of where highpass can help is on suboptimal, mushy HD footage where it’s usually better to work on frequencies rather than outline/contours. it’s more obvious there.

if you want to try yourself, here is the published highpass filter:
https://sebastianleitner.com/highpass-fcp.zip