Sharpening

[Emma Mcneill]

yep, re-shoot it all with a Sony F900R and a good lens ;o)

if it’s soft then it’s probably going to stay soft. Video resolution is pretty low compared to stills photography (where photo sharpening is pretty limited) so there is not a lot of information to sharpen.

[Liam Stephens]

Ah re-shoot it, awesome idea extremely helpful! So anyone else got any good ideas?

[13]

If your original HDV was 1080 then it wasnt upraised at all because the frame size stayed the same. It was just simply converted to another format.

Was the original footage soft in the first place?

[Liam Stephens]

it was shot on HDV 1440×1080 and was also shot very poorly so it is out of focus and soft which is a lot more evident now i am working 1920×1080.

[Mark Maness]

Let me ask you this…

How did you get from HDV to HD?

The reason I ask is that HDV if it 1080 than its the same as regular HD except for the pixel width. If its 720, then the video needs to be cross-converted to 1080. I’ve done this many times without the video looking soft.

I’m not picking on you but HDV is already HD. The only thing you can do is cross-convert 720 to 1080.

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com
https://blogs.creativecow.net/waynecarey

[Mark Maness]

In that case…. You can’t make apples from turnips.

Like I said earlier… HDV is HD. Stretching the pixels a little doesn’t make the video more out of focus. The issue alot of videographers have is looking at the small LCD screens for focus. I have a shooter that has done this very thing many times. There’s nothing you can do, other than reshoot.

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com
https://blogs.creativecow.net/waynecarey

[Liam Stephens]

Im not feeling picked on im just dealin with what i have been given and just trying to find answers. Doesnt matter how it got soft or how it got from HDV to HD, i just got to make it look as sharp as possible using the footage i have got.
🙂
L

[Liam Stephens]

Ok fair enuff,
i have seen a version where they have sharpened the image using some technique still looks crappy but looks a lot better than what i have. Due to politics yada yada yada i do not have access to this version, as all good editors do im trying to make best with my situation…

[Graeme Nattress]

If you’e got FCS2 with Color, I’ve got some tools which may help you. https://www.nattress.com/Products/FinalTouch/FTGSmartDeNoise.htm which sounds like a denoise filter, also has the capability of adding sharpening without any possibility of it sharpening or enhancing noise (you just leave the sharpening on, but turn the denoise part off).

For some other sharpening, there’s a smart sharpen tool which is clever as it doesn’t work traditionally, but can, if used with subtlety, can bring slightly out of focus edges into focus. This type of sharpening doesn’t amplify noise, but can produce distortion if you overdo it.

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP

[Michael Gissing]

Liam, just finished uploading an HDV project to HD uncompressed. There were lots of shots that were a bit soft due to poor location focus technique and some back focus issues. We compiled it and played out to HDCam so it could go to a facility that had a Teranex which they used to sharpen the soft shots.

The result was quite amazing, nothing like the edge sharpen stuff in FCP which just looks awful. Luckily the footage was well lit so there wasn’t other issues with grainy electronics to deal with. I believe a Snell & Wilcox ARC box does similar resharpening which I suspect is a pixel interpolation like the Teranex. Don’t waste time looking for plugins in FCP. This takes serious processing and very smart algorithms.