If you have Photoshop CS6, you can import video and access PS's vastly superior unsharp mask.

This is easy.

1. Duplicate your video track or event directly above the original.
2. Apply the Sharpen=0 plugin only to the lower track or event.
3. Set preview window to Best/Full
3. Adjust the opacity of the upper track to 50%, more or less to suit.

@ vtxrocketeer
Great! I haven't used that yet. Learned something new, thanks.

@ Andy_L
I would like to apply the effect to the whole track so that it effects all the original clips events on the timeline. Without re-rendering the footage.

@ musicvid
:-) that was the option that I have mentioned at the end of my original message. Indeed if it was just one clip then I could do that. But I have a large project with many clips in place (to be sharpened). I want to avoid re-rendering as well. But thanks for your tip.

That's not the way it works.
Sharpening is an effect.
You will not be applying an effect without rendering.

Hi musicvid

Yes I understand that.
What I meant was that I have a timeline with many clips that must be sharpened, so the opacity option would require them all being duplicated/layered on the track above and the opacity to be set to 50% for example.
Or I could render the whole timeline (make it one clip) then import it and do the duplicate/opacity trick. But that extra step would degrade the quality.

Putting the Convolution on the track with all the events works best at this moment :- ).

In that case, I think you would do much better with a very modest Unsharp Mask applied to the output (the FX button on the preview window), if the desired sharpening will be the same across the board.

There are three distinct levels of hierarchy where you can apply an effect: at the Event, Track, or Output (or Video Bus) levels. If you have many video tracks, it is possible to first render a lossless composite track from which to work as either the reference or FX track. Which works for you will depend on your workflow and comfort level. Best.

"As you may know the standard Vegas 'sharpen' plug-in already applies effect at '0' level"
Indeed but not really a problem. If it bugs you simply clip it with say the Broadcast Colors FX on the buss.

"But that is already too much (getting aliasing issue)."

I've never seen aliasing issues caused by the level of the video. They are caused by the frequency of the signal and adding edge detail can most certainly cause these kinds of problems.
The issue becomes very significant if downscale e.g. you shoot HD, put that on a HD T/L, add sharpening and render that to a lower resolution. The sharpening should be applied AFTER downscaling otherwise Mr Nyquist is possibly going to dance around in your video.

Two solutions:

1) Apply no sharpening to yoyr HD project and Nest it into a SD project, add Sharpening to the parent and render from that.

2) Change your HD project to an SD project, apply Sharpening to that and render from it. This works because Vegas downscales your footage first to project resolution, before any FX etc are applied.

Bob.

I do a lot of my sharpening now using the filter LSFmod in AviSynth. Not a Vegas plugin as such, and takes a bit of setting up, but it produces less artefacts such as ringing. I frameserve to AviSynth with Debugmode Frameserver. The script is really simple (but of course can become complicated if you do other things in AviSynth at the same time):

AviSource("d:\fs.avi")

ConvertToYV12

lsfmod(strength=200)

On 1080p footage, values of 200 to 1000 all gave me quite similar results. 500 works well to resharpen after denoising.

By the way – in the latest few Vegas Pro versions you can set the Sharpen effect level to zero which doesn't have any affect onto the video then.

There are three FX that can be usaed for this, Sharpen, Convolusion Kernel and Unsharp Mask (yes, this can be used for sharpening - have a look at the presets for example). I've always found that using one or the other of these has met my needs unless the original was just too bad to be saved but I will often reach my eventual result as much by trial and error as by original judgement! Musicvid's suggestion of duplicating the event is also an excellent way of dealing with the problem and is sometimes better for fine-tuning.

I'd be very surprised if one of these four options doesn't get the result you want, especially bearing in mind what Bob has said about aliasing - you may wish to check whether it is in fact aliasing you are seeing: if it is you may need to reconsider your approach.

Good luck,

Richard

Thanks all,

vtxrocketeer's Convolution Kernel template works great.
I have modified the 'Row 2 | Col 2 |' to 44.000. That gives the eyes of the subject a nice crisp look.

I am shooting with my HXR NX5, the default setting is quite shallow and unsharp so I took the tip from this forum and boosted the detail & crisp level in the picture profile setting.
Hope that post sharpening will be unnecessary from now onwards.

@ musicvid
Thanks indeed the video preview FX works great.

@ farss
Indeed I had cropped one clip (10%), that was the one that had the most aliasing. Also the coat zipper of one of the interview subjects showed some artifacts.

Also slowed down clips showed some artifacts.

Checking ‘Reduce interlace flicker’ and ‘Disable resample’ got rid of the artifacts.

The whole pipeline is ‘HD 1080-50i (1920x1080; 25,000 fps)’ The camera setting, project setting and the final render.

In a nutshell, when resizing and changing the velocity (frame rate) of your footage, you must:
1. Set render quality to Best, this can be done in the project or render dialogs.
2. Choose a deinterlace method, many people set theirs at Interpolate by default.
3. Disable Resample on each event, or do it to all events with a script.
4. Even with your modest resizing, I can see the reason for a slight sharpening.

FYI, Sharpen and Unsharp Mask are two different concepts. The latter doesn't actually sharpen, but reduces blurring, a different effect. Thus its name.

In going from HD to SD in NTSC 1920 x 1280/60i to 720 x 480i with NO velocity change, I don't disable smart resample in Vegas Pro 8.
Do any of you do that?

Final format DVD.


John

Leaving smart resampling on makes no difference if there is no frame rate change, as far as I can tell.
60i (HD) is an abbreviation for 29.97 interlaced (SD).

Musicvid,

Yes you are right in what you say about the Unsharp Mask FX but, despite the technicalities, one of the presets it offers is "Sharpen." I have found that it will often offer the degree of correction I am looking for and is often my first port of call when I have an event that needs tightening up.

The name "Unsharp Mask" harks back to the days of Black and White printing in the darkroom. If you were faced with a problem negative that needed to be sharpened it sometimes paid to create a duplicate but weak and slightly-off focus negative which was then bound to the original. With a bit of luck this sometimes resulted in an acceptably sharp print but the method could be very hit and miss and I have to admit that I had mixed success with it in the days when I used to spend so much of my time on B & W printmaking. What it did when it worked was to effectively.exaggerate contrast along any edges in the image, so making them stand out more and thus appear sharper.

Richard

Yes Richard, you are correct, however naming a USM preset "Sharpen" doesn't mean it is a Sharpen filter. In fact, it works almost the opposite way.

The most basic Sharpen filter is a high-pass (actually high-boost) filter applied to the image data. You can think of an Unsharp Mask as a low-pass filter that is subtracted from the image data (so it's really low-cut). Advantage is that we don't blow out pixels. So we are in effect "reducing blur," although that is a bit oversimplified.

The subtle corrections USM offers are just right for many situations, apparently including the OP's needs as well.

I had asked questions in the past about uprezzing with no budget, and was pretty much told to go look at Doom 9 or get BCC8, but I think I learned a lot more from just this thread alone.