GH2 In camera sharpening or post?

A

alkota

Active member
Can someone explain the advantages of sharpening in post vs. in camera? I.E. If I turn sharpening down to -2 to achieve a more flat image and then use unsharp mask in after effects/premiere pro, fcp, etc.

Is it better to have -2 sharpness and dial in the look I want in post or achieve it in camera?

I get the whole experiment to achieve the best results idea, but im looking for some technical background for both methods and their advantages and disadvantages.

Loving the GH2 since I sold my Canon 7D. As an early adopter of the 7D I felt completely taken by Canon and their lack of firmware updates and features (mainly manual audio). GH2 is everything I wanted the 7D to be from the git go.

Thanks
 
Sharpen always be easy to add in post, but not remove, and the results are the same. Benefits to no do in camera are: better compression performance due to not high frecuency detail, better color correction in post like no halos around the edges, less artifacting... and you can add always sharpen in post.
 
Funnily enough I recently started a thread on the same subject in the Workflow sub-forum:

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?244663-Shoting-flat-and-sharpening-in-post

Bitcrusher said:

I have been using RGB curves for that. You are compressing your blacks and highlights to give more contrast at the cost of mid-tones. Its not the same as sharping. But will make you footage have a sharper look.

I will also use it to balance out the look of deferent lenes as well. The shoot flat theory is not to loose sharpness but have as low of contrast as posable for more latitude in post for grading.

Here is a video I like. It uses a plug in that you do not need to use, but the theory is all there and being used in a real world situation.

http://www.vimeo.com/19216343
Click to expand...

Another chap mentioned unsharp mask.

Let's carry on the subject in your thead here, because I don't think many people check the Workflow forum!
 
Okay, thats what I thought. I did some tests with the pre-sharpening (in camera) and post sharpening and I couldn't tell the difference. I guess it would be better anyhow to adjust your sharpening flavor after the fact to dial it in.
 
I'd say a good comparison would be on a pan shot with a high shutter speed (less motion blur) to where you are pushing the data rate. Then, see what happens between the sharpening settings in that.
 
stonebat said:
Doesn't the sharpening increase the chance of having moire and aliasing?
Click to expand...
No, a sharpening filter can neither create nor eliminate aliasing artifacts. Aliasing is produced at the point where the incident light is digitized by the image sensor. The sharpening filter is applied later, when the sensor's photocells are averaged together to produce RGB pixels. If the image already contains aliasing artifacts, the sharpening filter may make them more noticeable, along with sharpening genuine image details.

It's generally better to use only moderate in-camera sharpening, so long as the codec has adequate bitrate to encode all image details without creating blocky compression artifacts. With a low-bitrate encoder, however, sharpening the image before compression may help insure that edge details are prominent enough to be encoded with enough bits to avoid blocky edges.
 
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