Watch full screen 1080p to prevent aliasing:
If you are into brick walls:
The method:
1. Shoot Faithful or Neutral (tested so far, custom styles will also work): make sure Sharpening is 0 (this will prevent halos caused by in-camera Unsharp Masking).
2. Shoot IPB (I-frame not quite ready for primetime: either an encoder issue or PPro CS5.5 can't deblock it properly (or some other issue)).
3. Sharpen with a convolution filter. In PPro this is the Video Effect "Sharpen". I have found 25-50 to work well depending on the lens and content. The trick is to increase sharpness but not make noise or other artifacts apparent (including aliasing).
4. Unsharp Masking (USM) can also be helpful (haven't tried used it in PPro CS5.5 as it's not real-time). USM can also be used for local contrast enhancement: http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/local-contrast-enhancement.htm. Hopefully CS6 will have real-time USM (it's easy to implement on a GPU).
Some folks believe sharpening in post is cheating, and that the camera should output sharp content directly. The challenge is that as sharpness is increased, aliasing is also increased. To understand better why this is so, take a look at sampling theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist–Shannon_sampling_theorem
For whatever engineering/marketing reason the 5D3 shipped with firmware outputting a highly anti-aliased image (almost no aliasing, even for very difficult content (see videos above)), however some people are used to sharp, aliased content. Keep in mind film has no aliasing, and its apparent resolution is helped with film grain.
When information is encoded in pixels through an anti-aliasing process, it can be sharpened using a convolution filter to increase perceived sharpness at the expense of increased aliasing. For most people, a small amount of aliasing is acceptable (GH2, FS100, F3, etc.). Even the mighty top-end cameras such as the C300 and Alexa have aliasing and moire issues (probably F65 too): http://www.xdcam-user.com/2012/02/c300-moire/. When aliasing and especially moire is recorded, it is hard or impossible to remove in post. Thus the highly anti-aliased footage coming from the 5D3 is a benefit to those shooting clothing and around brick walls, and car grills/detail as with the Bugatti Veyron in the first video above.
So why not just throw a convolution sharpen filter on 5D2 or 7D footage and save the upgrade cost? Because these cameras have baked in aliasing, and the actual frequency information has not been spread into neighboring pixels and can never be recovered (well, not exactly true. Super Resolution uses aliasing information to recover lost frequency information: http://compression.ru/video/super_resolution/super_resolution_en.html, however no commercial tools have incorporated this technology yet). Sharpened 5D2/7D footage ends up with enhanced aliasing artifacts. If moire is present before sharpening, game over. Ultimately sharpened 5D2/7D footage cannot ever look as sharp as sharpened 5D3 footage.
In summary, I am pleased with the video image quality produced by the 5D Mark III. One of my day job tasks is to write CPU and GPU image processing code. I am intimately familiar with image quality issues, and I think Canon has done an excellent job for this initial release. I think it would be helpful for a future firmware upgrade to provide better control for in-camera sharpening: a mixture of USM and convolution. This could save post time for some workflows. I would also prefer the 50Mbps 422 MXF codec to the I-frame 420 codec (VBR: measured at 28Mbps for some of my footage).
Andrew at EOSHD was kind enough to give post sharpening a try, despite his skepticism:
http://www.eoshd.com/content/7608/cinestyle-on-the-5d-mark-iii-and-fixing-softness-in-post#d2
He was able to make 5D3 footage comparable to the GH2 (to my eyes, the 5D3 image is a bit sharper, however the cameras are focused slightly differently). He's not really sold on post sharpening, and that's fair, however the 5D3 does indeed encode and store the necessary frequency information for later high-quality sharpening if so desired. The GH2, D800 and similar cameras do not currently have an option to provide little or no aliasing+moire.
Sebastian at Cinema5D also got good results, see his video comparing the 5D3, 7D, and Scarlet-X: http://cinema5d.com/viewtopic.php?f=88&t=39809
From his video you can see the 5D3 closely matches the Scarlet-X for his 2K test (granted the Scarlet-X would do better shooting 4K and performing a filtered downsample). You can also see the 7D cannot be sharpened to match the sharpened 5D3.
If you are into brick walls:
The method:
1. Shoot Faithful or Neutral (tested so far, custom styles will also work): make sure Sharpening is 0 (this will prevent halos caused by in-camera Unsharp Masking).
2. Shoot IPB (I-frame not quite ready for primetime: either an encoder issue or PPro CS5.5 can't deblock it properly (or some other issue)).
3. Sharpen with a convolution filter. In PPro this is the Video Effect "Sharpen". I have found 25-50 to work well depending on the lens and content. The trick is to increase sharpness but not make noise or other artifacts apparent (including aliasing).
4. Unsharp Masking (USM) can also be helpful (haven't tried used it in PPro CS5.5 as it's not real-time). USM can also be used for local contrast enhancement: http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/local-contrast-enhancement.htm. Hopefully CS6 will have real-time USM (it's easy to implement on a GPU).
Some folks believe sharpening in post is cheating, and that the camera should output sharp content directly. The challenge is that as sharpness is increased, aliasing is also increased. To understand better why this is so, take a look at sampling theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist–Shannon_sampling_theorem
For whatever engineering/marketing reason the 5D3 shipped with firmware outputting a highly anti-aliased image (almost no aliasing, even for very difficult content (see videos above)), however some people are used to sharp, aliased content. Keep in mind film has no aliasing, and its apparent resolution is helped with film grain.
When information is encoded in pixels through an anti-aliasing process, it can be sharpened using a convolution filter to increase perceived sharpness at the expense of increased aliasing. For most people, a small amount of aliasing is acceptable (GH2, FS100, F3, etc.). Even the mighty top-end cameras such as the C300 and Alexa have aliasing and moire issues (probably F65 too): http://www.xdcam-user.com/2012/02/c300-moire/. When aliasing and especially moire is recorded, it is hard or impossible to remove in post. Thus the highly anti-aliased footage coming from the 5D3 is a benefit to those shooting clothing and around brick walls, and car grills/detail as with the Bugatti Veyron in the first video above.
So why not just throw a convolution sharpen filter on 5D2 or 7D footage and save the upgrade cost? Because these cameras have baked in aliasing, and the actual frequency information has not been spread into neighboring pixels and can never be recovered (well, not exactly true. Super Resolution uses aliasing information to recover lost frequency information: http://compression.ru/video/super_resolution/super_resolution_en.html, however no commercial tools have incorporated this technology yet). Sharpened 5D2/7D footage ends up with enhanced aliasing artifacts. If moire is present before sharpening, game over. Ultimately sharpened 5D2/7D footage cannot ever look as sharp as sharpened 5D3 footage.
In summary, I am pleased with the video image quality produced by the 5D Mark III. One of my day job tasks is to write CPU and GPU image processing code. I am intimately familiar with image quality issues, and I think Canon has done an excellent job for this initial release. I think it would be helpful for a future firmware upgrade to provide better control for in-camera sharpening: a mixture of USM and convolution. This could save post time for some workflows. I would also prefer the 50Mbps 422 MXF codec to the I-frame 420 codec (VBR: measured at 28Mbps for some of my footage).
Andrew at EOSHD was kind enough to give post sharpening a try, despite his skepticism:
http://www.eoshd.com/content/7608/cinestyle-on-the-5d-mark-iii-and-fixing-softness-in-post#d2
He was able to make 5D3 footage comparable to the GH2 (to my eyes, the 5D3 image is a bit sharper, however the cameras are focused slightly differently). He's not really sold on post sharpening, and that's fair, however the 5D3 does indeed encode and store the necessary frequency information for later high-quality sharpening if so desired. The GH2, D800 and similar cameras do not currently have an option to provide little or no aliasing+moire.
Sebastian at Cinema5D also got good results, see his video comparing the 5D3, 7D, and Scarlet-X: http://cinema5d.com/viewtopic.php?f=88&t=39809
From his video you can see the 5D3 closely matches the Scarlet-X for his 2K test (granted the Scarlet-X would do better shooting 4K and performing a filtered downsample). You can also see the 7D cannot be sharpened to match the sharpened 5D3.
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