Sharpen your footage without the crunchy edges.
You apply Final Cut Pro's Sharpen effect and the shot looks contrasty and awful. There is one slider, Amount, so the only thing you can do is push harder, and pushing harder is what made it look bad in the first place.
Better Sharpening fixes that. Drag it on, set Radius for the shot, bring Amount up until it looks right. That's it.
Easy-to-use, sharpening effect for FCP (way better than the built-in Sharpen effect)
Compatible with FCP 10.6.4 and above
Better Sharpening gives you three controls. The one that matters is Radius: it sets how fine the detail is that you are sharpening, which is the difference between a shot that looks sharp and a shot that looks sharpened.
Drag the slider to compare the original shot vs the shot sharpened with Better Sharpening.
Drag the slider to compare the sharpened shot using Final Cut Pro's built-in effect vs the shot sharpened with Better Sharpening.
4K scaled down to 1080. Log footage that went soft through the grade. Drone and action camera shots. Anything that looked better in camera than it does on your timeline.
It will not rescue an out-of-focus shot. Nothing will. If focus missed, this gives you a soft shot with more contrast on the edges, and you are better off cutting around it.
Final Cut Pro has it's own Sharpen effect that is not good at all. In this tutorial I compare the built in effect with Better Sharpening and I cover exactly how this free plugin works.
Quit Final Cut Pro
Download the DMG file and double click to open it
Double-click on the installer and select "Install"
Open Final Cut Pro and head over to your Effects Browser
Look for the BW - Better Sharpening category and drag the effect onto your clip