In 2d Transform, after setting a 1 point stab, if filtering “nearest” provides an acceptable result, then after inv there appears to be 0 loss of quality.
If sub pixel stb and filtering is required, I find the old filter preset sharpen_light set to an effect of 35% brings back quite well the detail lost after stabilizing or doing an action move.
in the past for film, when removing film weave but keeping the grain sharpness, desktop stabilze with Oversampling turned on. (don’t know why that wouldn’t be on by default…)
The closest thing I’ve seen to the legendary “oversampling” (which I’ve heard was only on Inferno, but legends vary) is the “hardware filtering” in the Auto Stabilize, which has on occasion round tripped surprisingly well, but as with all things, mileage may vary.
It’s always been strange to be that it was considered to be nigh-perfect and yet doesn’t exist in the software today. I’d love to do tests and figure that all out, but who has the time (and an Onyx2)?
I mean, if you’re using the stabilize/ reintroduce motion method on just what you’re comping and not touching the rest of the plate you’re gonna be fine in most every instance (and like you said, maybe a little sharpen on the comped element after the fact). I don’t use this method very often, different strokes etc, but I guess we’re worried about the two filtering hits/ concatenation issues in the stabilized action and then the reintroduce motion action as opposed to just the single filtering hit you’d get just tracking it in in action.
The I only time I really end up changing my filtering in action is EWA+Linear for screen comps a lot of times on tiny screens. No need for any Anti-aliasing slowdowns, mostly just works. Softer thank Lanczos on purpose, you know? The various other nearest and Mitchell and whatever I don’t care about. I know the instances you might use them, but if the thousands of tiny things happening that can mess up a comp nearest vs Lanczos is pretty low on my list.
The issue for me doing features is that when we are doing 4K reviews in a DI theatre and the client wants to switch between the plate and the comp, you don’t want to hear the question “Why is the comp softer than the plate?”
That creates doubt in their mind, they start to lose confidence then they start questioning other aspects of the work that has been done.
I use both approaches, stabilising and not stabilising and when I do use the stablise approach I comp anything that differs from the original plate back onto the original plate so that only the changed elements have any filtering applied. I was interested if there was another way, hence asking the question.
If the fix or comp you need can be done without a paint node, or more specifically only with tools inside of action (definitely a constraint I know, not for every shot), you can also work on the stabilized version to line everything up, then just duplicate the tracked axis, turn invert off on the duplicate, and make everything in the scene a child of that and only take the filtering hit once.
