Video Sharpening Before Encoding
Often after encoding a video, and playing it back, it seldomly looks as good as I’d expect, especially compared to professionally produced DVDs for example. Now while there are likely a multitude of differences, one of them seems to be acutance (perceived sharpness), which can be enhanced by applying some sharpening after scaling the source material before encoding the video.
The following small script encodes a source video input to a anamorphic widescreen PAL DVD resolution WebM file at a nominal (total) bitrate of 2Mbit/sec, while applying some sharpening:
#!/bin/sh
INPUT="$1"
SCALE_OPTS="-sws_flags lanczos -s 720x576 -aspect 16:9"
SHARP_OPTS="-vf unsharp=3:3:0.5:3:3:0"
VIDEO_OPTS="-vcodec libvpx -g 120 -lag-in-frames 15 -deadline good -profile 0 -qmax 51 -qmin 11 -slices 4 -b 1800000 -maxrate 3800000"
AUDIO_OPTS="-acodec libvorbis -ac 2 -ab 192000"
avconv -i "${INPUT}" ${SCALE_OPTS} ${SHARP_OPTS} ${VIDEO_OPTS} -an -pass 1 -f webm -y "out-${INPUT}.webm"
avconv -i "${INPUT}" ${SCALE_OPTS} ${SHARP_OPTS} ${VIDEO_OPTS} ${AUDIO_OPTS} -pass 2 -f webm -y "out-${INPUT}.webm"
Now what particularly matters are the unsharp parameters, which can be divided into two triplets, the first set of three: luma (brightness (greyscale) information) and the second set of three: chroma (color information). Each of these two sets has three parameters, of which the first two are the horizontal and vertical matrix dimensions (e.g. the evaluation area), in our case a small matrix of 3 by 3 is the only configuration that makes sense. A 5 by 5 matrix is possible but will give a exagerated effect and halo artifacts. The last parameter in the triplets is the strength (respectively 0.5 for luma, and 0 for chroma), which means we’re enhancing acutance for luma, and we’re leaving the chroma unmodified. For luma strength values between 0.5 and 1.0 are likely to be the useful range depending on taste and source material. Typically you’d want to leave chroma be, but in some cases you could possibly use this as a poor mans denoising method by specifying negative values, which effectively turns it into a blur effect.