v1.2.x Digital Anarchy Samurai Sharpen for Video

Easily Enhance Your Footage with Samurai Sharpen for Video

Precisely and easily sharpen and enhance details in your videos with Digital Anarchy Samurai for Video.

Video footage is often a little soft and enhancing it to sharpen certain details can make a world of difference. Samurai Sharpen allows you to do this quickly with tools designed to let you easily isolate specific areas of the footage and only sharpen those areas. It’s state-of-the-art sharpening for video footage that’s precise and simple.

Sharpen Only the Important Features of Your Video with Edge-Aware Algorithms

You usually want to enhance and sharpen only significant features in your video footage. Samurai Sharpen is a smart, edge-aware sharpening filter which means it’s able to enhance important details like eyes, while not affecting areas like skin which you don’t want sharpened.

Never Sharpen Noise Again with Built-In Masking

The built-in masking tools allow you to protect shadow and highlight areas from being sharpened. This is critical as shadow areas usually show a lot of noise but little detail. The masks prevent the noise from being enhanced along with the important details. It also allows you to prevent highlight areas from getting blown out.

Features

Sharpening Where You Want It, Precise and Simple

Powerful, Easy Sharpening for Video

Most video footage can use a bit of sharpening. There’s always some softness that happens when you capture an image through a lens. However, sharpening video can be tricky. You don’t want to sharpen noise or create motion artifacts. Samurai Sharpen lets you easily enhance the areas of the video that you want sharpened, while protecting the areas you don’t want sharpened.

Smart, Edge-Aware Algorithms

The first thing any good sharpening plugin should do is identify the significant features in your footage and just enhance those edges. This allows you to sharpen areas like eyes, which have well defined edges, and not sharpen areas like skin, which are flatter areas of color without many hard edges. You don’t want to turn your actor’s skin into sandpaper!

Built-In Masking

The masks in Samurai Sharpen allow you to protect the Shadows and Highlights from being sharpened. Camera noise is one of the banes of sharpening and the dark areas of video footage have a ton of it. Luckily the masks in Samurai make it a simple task to prevent those areas from being sharpened and not turn your video into a noisy mess. Sharpening where you want it, simply and easily.

Precise, Fine-Tuning Controls

Sharpening works by increasing the contrast along the edges in footage. This creates a light and dark side to the edge (called halos). Samurai Sharpen has Blend controls to adjust the intensity of either the light or dark halo independently. This gives you precise and unprecedented control over the look of the enhancements you make to your video footage.

Support for Adobe After Effects, Premiere Pro, Apple FCP X, Avid & DaVinci Resolve

We want to support you no matter what host application you’re using. So regardless of what video app you need sharpening in, we’re on it. We currently support Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro, Apple’s Final Cut Pro X, Avid and DaVinci Resolve. Versions for  other OpenFX (Assimilate Scratch, Sony Vegas, etc.) are coming soon.

Fast GPU Rendering

We use your video card’s GPU to drastically speed up rendering, getting real time performance with some video cards. This lets Samurai Sharpen fit into your video production workflow just as easily as it is to use. The faster you can knock out a video edit or color grade, the faster you can go home! (ok, yeah, we know that doesn’t happen… but it does allow you more time to deal with client panic attacks.