Sharpen by 0 to 64 ... whats best?

[Really Ripped]

Okay, so after I processed a Divx5 job all the way thru Gknot I still think it looks slightly 'out-of-focus' when compare to the original VOB. Not a whole lot but just a tiny bit.

Can I run the Divx5 .AVI final project thru VDUB one more time with the Sharpening Filter on? Do I just set the video compression to Divx5 and choose my Sharpening Filter to something like a scale of 5?

If I cant do that, how can I get VDUB to do a Sharpening Filter when it does the 1st and 2nd passes on the original Gknot Job? It seems like VDUB pops up automatically during my Gknot job and I have no way to jump in a place a filter on it.

Please help

[Asmodian]

Well you could run the final avi through VD again but it would look much worse rather then slightly better :p, double encoding with lossy codecs is a very bad idea. Which resize algorithm are you using? You could edit the .avs gordian knot makes and change the resize line to LanczosResize(last, target_width, target_height) for a sharper resize (you must use AviSynth v2.06 or later). There are also many sharpen filters for avisynth you could try. ffdshow can also apply a few sharpen filters while playing the video in any direct show player (if you have the cpu power to do it), you might want to look into it.

[?¿öM¿?]

Try altering (if you use Bicubic resize) the last parametre to 1, ie, BicubicResize(x,x,x,1).

Turn off any denoise operations as this is a smoothing effect. It is rarely recommended to sharpen and smooth the same movie.

Use a higher maximum quantizer so that the bps can be more
effectively distributed to where it needs to go. 10max, 2min is a good rule.

If the movie has many slow pan, still shots and face close ups, etc, with less fast motion (frequent key-frames), drop the RC averaging period down to 1500 or 1000. For stuff where key frames are frequently used, raise it to 2500 or more. Try not to go over 4000. This parametre seems to be effective only at lower bitrates or on movies with bad compressability. Two pass encoding also significantly drops how effective it is (is this correct?).

Increase your bitrate so you get a lower average quantizer.

I agree with the above statement concerning double encoding. Never do it if it can be avoided (which it usually can).
:)