What kind of sharpening do you use ?
 

Hey,
When I shoot on my 7D, I have my settings as flat as possible so I could do everything in post, but a lot of times I found the footage seems really soft.
So now I was thinking of doing some sort of sharpening onto it.
Do you also do it ? Now I tried the sharpen effect and unsharp mask, but I think the boundary between too little and too much is really small.

Genuine Fractals....

onOne Genuine Fractals 5 review @ Designpreference.com

Does that work for video? Or is it only photo sharpening in Lightroom / Photoshop?

Genuine Fractals ?
Isn't that for enlarging pictures ?

Personally, I prefer to avoid sharpening altogether, because it exacerbates aliasing artifacts. But if I was to sharpen, it would definitely be during in-camera processing, where the sharpening can be applied to the 14-bit raw image, instead of in post where all I have is the 8-bit compressed image to work with. Doing that will exacerbate the compression artifacts (on top of the aliasing).

Totally agree with Daniel, sharpen in camera. I'd just add that the extra rendering time required with a sharpen filter isn't fun.

Daniel has a point, but in general sharpening should only be applied on OUTPUT. Furthermore, different displays and different display resolutions require a varying amounts of sharpening. You can apply sharpening in Compressor and similar programs, though personally, I try to avoid it altogether by using sharp lenses with all artificial sharpening turned off.

I've generally never been a fan of sharpening BUT recently, there's been a good shot or two that i was going to purge from my bins because of tad-too-soft focus...yes, my talent moved...1mm...the horror!!

So what i do is mask an area, and sharpen a small patch, i.e: an eye... and it REALLY helps those tad-too-soft focus. Its more selective, you only have to do it a for short period of time to keep people in the moment, say at the beginning of the cut/edit.

As for sharpening in-camera, its doesn't really look so good on a large monitor. I find that reducing the sharpness half way, actually increases "the magic' that the camera produces. And setting the in-camera sharpness all the way down, begs for post sharpening, which doesn't make any sense!

That's why I stay mostly at +1 for in camera sharpnening. "0" is too much.

Edit: What I meant was no sharpening on this camera can be too much. I have to start at +1 or 2.

The lack of resolution these DSLR's produce they make up for with artificial sharpening which introduces a lot of aliasing... if this makes no sense or you don't believe it, ask Barry Green. I shoot with the sharpness all the way down on my 5D and sharpen in post if needed.