C100: Post Production Sharpening

ollywood88

ollywood88

Well-known member
Hi all,

I am interested to hear what post production sharpening everyone is doing. I know it will vary from production/lens/ settings etc.

I shoot WIDE DR dialed sharpening down to around -8.

I then add in an Unsharpen Mask and set the radius as 1.0 and percent as 20% IN Premiere pro. I feel it could benefit from a little more.

Whats everyone's workflow?

Many Thanks
 
Yup again depends what lenses. Thanks for your input.

Some of the canon lenses I find softer than say samyang's
 
Radius of 1.0 is way too much for 1080P footage, in fact, the default value 1.0 is usually used for SD or DV tape. For C100/300 footage, since it's pixel binned from 4K sensor, the radius should be set to 0.3 to avoid edge halo and to truly bring out the detail, same applies to 1D C 4K footage, radius 0.3 offers subtle yet effective increase in micro-contrast. Typically, you use bigger radius for soft image and smaller radius for sharp image. Other cameras for example, 5D Mark III (non-ML) should be sharpened with radius of 0.5. Also bear in mind that sharpening heavily compressed footage like AVCHD or H264 may accentuate noise and micro-blocking.
 
I agree, depends on what your internal settings are surely. Like I said I dialed down the sharpness. If you are using 0.3 what setting are you using around 30%?
 
ollywood88 said:
I agree, depends on what your internal settings are surely. Like I said I dialed down the sharpness. If you are using 0.3 what setting are you using around 30%?
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I'm using Premiere Pro CC 2014, the "Unsharp Mask" effect doesn't use percentage to indicate strength, the default value is 50, for c100 I'd say around 100 to 150. It all depends on personal taste and the footage really, if it's a portrait shoot I'd leave it as 50.
 
marvinhello said:
Radius of 1.0 is way too much for 1080P footage
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Politely disagree with ya marv, staring at a shot right now captured internally with .8 40% 0 and it looks amazing. No unwanted noise or macro blocking. Also tested on some interview footage and found the results to be similar. While I wouldn't call it a best practice, it is certainly a capable option for giving detail a little punch.
 
I'm unfamiliar with the practice of sharpening in post. Is this common place? I can see doing this with a 5D maybe or if you're enlarging footage.

I just use the camera in Cinema Lock or WideDR and it is very sharp. Why push this step further down the workflow chain?
 
I find it to be more of a stylistic choice rather than a necessity with the cinema cameras. They really do resolve an impressive amount of detail straight out of the camera.

In regards to my previous post, as I was perusing this thread I had JUST finished a round of tests to see how far I could push the C100's internal image. The shot was a macro level closeup of a pupil which was razor sharp out of the camera(even with sharpness at -10). The unsharp mask was used for experimenting but the final result looked fantastic!
 
Interesting... I have never heard of this process before, but the post houses I have worked with are not that big (generally national ads and television, rarely major features or anything above 2 million). But this is news to me.
 
Policar said:
I'm unfamiliar with the practice of sharpening in post. Is this common place? I can see doing this with a 5D maybe or if you're enlarging footage.

I just use the camera in Cinema Lock or WideDR and it is very sharp. Why push this step further down the workflow chain?
Click to expand...

because pixel binned image tends to lack perceived sharpness (or micro-contrast), adding a subtle amount of sharpening adds character :)
 
Cool, I'll give it a go. In my experience intercutting with Alexa and Epic the CX00 is the sharpest of them all (at 1080p). But to be fair those cameras have an intentionally "soft" look.
 
So are a lot of people now leaving Wide DR settings out of the box or reducing the sharpening in the settings? Mine is set to -5. I figured I can always soften the image versus trying to sharpen one.
 
When I first tried the 'turn down sharpness, add it back in post' I was astonished - became an instant convert. Especially as, at the time, I was using DSLRs.

Sharpening is indelible. Get it wrong, and its there for keeps. But so many cameras need just a little to help things along a little.

If you reduce sharpening to a minimum, it's disturbing to look at the rushes untreated, and it makes it hard to focus in the field.

I don't use Premiere Pro - I use FCPX, and the standard sharpen filter defaults to 2.5, which is enough to provide a bit of definition.

Doing sharpening in post is far more subtle and satisfactory than doing it in-camera. The camera's got to do a lot of complex maths on top of the compression in the fraction of a second between frames. The results are okay, but not totally pretty. Besides, the camera's processor is nothing compared to your NLE processor. Your NLE can do sharpening in its own sweet time during the render, which is where the subtlety and grace comes from.

Furthermore, you can not only adjust shot by shot, you can mask off areas that don't need it.

C-Log turns down sharpening by default. WDR contains a little bit.

If you're shooting Chromakey, TURN OFF SHARPENING in the camera. It makes for keys with thin black lines around them, meaning you have to erode the key a little, taking away your subtle detail.

Having said all that, I leave some sharpening on when I don't have time to do lots of sharpen twiddles in post. Sometimes it's important to have a nice looking edit ready picture that doesn't need surgery in post. Yes, I'm happy to say that I use the WDR 'out of the box' for most shooting (but I have a WDR for chromakey too :smile: ).
 
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