When I check the check box, it is checked. When I uncheck it, the effect goes away.
But, why is there an effect, at all, with a 0.000 setting?

Same thing still happening after I uninstalled, cleaned the register, and reinstalled clean. It has an effect even when the setting is 0.000. Strange.

I can duplicate this - it's easiest to see on darker footage.

I noticed the same thing with the convolution kernel.

It doesn't take darkened footage for me to see it. It is very obvious.

Why?

Thanks for bringing these to our attention- I agree, a setting of zero should have no visible effect.

Even though a couple of the video plug-ins have the "not truly 0" issue, please note that bypassing a plug-in is different from setting values to "0". Enabled plug-ins, regardless of the setting, force recompression. Bypassed plug-ins (unchecked) will not force recompression. So if you want to leave an effect in the chain but aren't actually using it, bypass it rather than set it to 0- your renders will go faster.

The thing that really interests me about this is that there IS a change with a ZERO. It would be nice to know how MUCH change there is, numerically. What is the equivilent NON-Zero setting? If I knew that, it might even be useful.

Since ZERO has a positive effect, does this mean that a small negative number would have more nearly a true Zero effect?

Interesting.

I would assume, based on what SonicEPM posted, that a zero setting really is not sharpening at all. What you're seeing most likely is the effects of the video being decompressed and then recompressed again. Any value other than zero, in a negative or positive direction, would show a greater change than zero does.

> Even though a couple of the video plug-ins have the "not truly 0"
> issue, please note that bypassing a plug-in is different from setting
> values to "0". Enabled plug-ins, regardless of the setting, force
> recompression. Bypassed plug-ins (unchecked) will not force recompression.
> So if you want to leave an effect in the chain but aren't actually using it,
> bypass it rather than set it to 0- your renders will go faster.

Which leads to another 'feature'. At least to my way of thinking, I would expect that a zero (or neutral) setting would produce 'no effect' at all. I would have thought that the program could also be smart enough to realize no action was needed for that time and avoid slowing down. 'Bypassing' the effect plug-in is only useful when you don't have a (perhaps small) section that still needs the effect.

I convert two hour Hi8 tapes to DVD. Some sections need assorted combinations of Brightness/Contrast, Color Balance, and video noise reduction (through Gaussian Blur and then Sharpen).

I originally tried using the Track FX to set the level of effect for sections which need help, and then set a 'neutral' setting for sections I didn't want changed. This worked (well mostly :-) ), but slowed down rendering substantially even in places where a 'no effect' setting was selected.

Today, I split the video into several video tracks so as to avoid slowing down the entire render even on sections with zero set effect (when the settings for Brightness change, color balance change, Blur and sharpen are set to what should be no change).

Even on a P4 2.2 GHz system, It can take 36 hours to render a two hour DV AVI when I have all effects on one track.

It would be convienient if the program could 1) actually not make any changes when a Null/Neutral setting is set and 2) Realize no work needs to be done in those sections so as not to slow down the render as much as it does today.

Thanks;

-Greg Bohn