Sharpen Video in VSE (or other way in Blender?)

Support Compositing and Post Processing
21

And, y’know, maybe I’ll be barbequed for saying this, but … I personally don’t use VSE much. I bought a copy of Final Cut quite some time ago, got used to using it, and have been using it ever since. What I use Blender to do is to produce material for subsequent cutting.

Now… my copy of FC doesn’t do image processing to the degree that Blender itself does, so I do bob back-and-forth between the two. I don’t try to use VSE “strips” for these purposes: I use nodes. What I use FC for is strictly editing, whether the material being edited is computer-generated or not. (And when I am doing a computer-generated piece, I actually generate “rough” animatic-style pieces with the preview render tool, edit that into as near to final-form as I can get it, then start generating things to drop into the “cut” as it develops.

22

Sundialsvc4,

I don’t think anybody begrudges you using another system.

For me, it’s totally a matter of money and RAM efficiency on my own computer. I’ve used Adobe Premiere a lot, but it’s unbearably slow on my computer when I get it through Torrent. And because I have no money - and because the open-source communities are so awesome with support - I just end up using open source for most everything.

I saw on Blender’s Development page (http://www.blender.org/development/) that they’re going to be working on “VFX Pipeline” for 2.64, so maybe that means that the VSE will be upgraded a lot.

And, by and large, I think the VSE can do most things that commercial editors can do. Although I know that there are two good ones for Linux - Cinerella and Open Shot, but I have Windows XP.

23

Okay! Thanks to many of the posts here and many of the posters at BlenderQA (and working on it myself), I more-or-less succeeded here. The process was:

  1. Go to the Nodes dialogue and insert the video and any of the other set-ups you like for your personal workflow
  2. Add a Sharpening Node. Set it to whatever value looks right.
  3. Add a Blur Node. Take off whatever edges from the sharpening.
  4. Add a Stretch Node. Set this to the Render size. (Otherwise, the smaller video file will just be a postage stamp-sized little image in the center of a big black canvas on the HD render size. This Node stretches it out to whatever the render setting’s canvas size is.)
  5. Add the Output > Composite Node.

Then go into the VSE.
6) Add > Scene. NOTE: In the VSE’s preview window, the imported Scene will just show what’s in the 3D View, so you can’t observe the Node imagery there.
7) In the “N” panel in the VSE, check the Crop box. Set it so that the letterbox bars are gone.

Anyway, I know that these steps probably aren’t going to be too helpful to many people, because this was kind of a rare situation, I think. The main issues were:

A) The cropping in the Nodes just has an overall odd control panel. What’s more, they do not work the same as in the VSE, where the cropped area is actually occupied by stretching up the other area, so it doesn’t respond the same as you’d expect if you use the VSE’s a lot.
B) Apparently, Nodes are the only way to add a sharpening filter onto a video. But they’re really not hard for this use. I’d never used them before and had little difficulty. This tutorial provided some good foundations: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbF0VL5FNsg&feature=plcp

Thanks again to everybody.

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