Can "Filtering" a Video Through YouTube Improve It

KRyan wrote on 4/27/2010, 1:56 PM
I know, this is a weird one. It started in my thread asking if my dark video was totally beyond improving. The video was shot on a Samson Zoom Q3 (resulted in a ".mov" file) in a dark tavern during a concert, so yeah, poor lighting was the culprit. After failing to improve it in Vegas Pro, someone asked to see it, so I uploaded it to YouTube. As a test, this kind soul grabbed the video from YouTube and ran it through some Vegas Pro filters. He asked if he could have the original file, so I FTP'd it to my website and he downloaded it from there. But all attempts to improve THAT version of the file were doomed! I clipped 3 stills, one from 3 different versions of the video, which can be seen here:

http://ravenboymusic.com/Private.htm

The pic on the top left is direct from the original file being played in QT. It's dark but you can still see that there are two people in the video. The pic on the right is the "after" version from when the above-mentioned kind soul snagged the version from YouTube.

The pic on the right is the result after he downloaded the .mov file from my site and and ran filters and noise reduction on it. It's almost totally black.

So here's the big question---why is it that the bottom video is the one that shows the most content when the only difference is that it was "filtered" through YouTube first?

Thanks.

Ken

Comments

farss wrote on 4/27/2010, 2:34 PM
Its all to do with LCDs crushing blacks and where the blacks are.
You can do this in Vegas using the Color Curves FX, no magic involved at all.
On the other hand all you're seeing is in the realm of forensic analysis. In terms of what most would consider "improved" what you're seeing out of Youtube is worse, not better. It might even be possible to extract a frame good enough to ID the ladies, even using what filters Vegas has or else using some rather expensive plugins that don't run in Vegas. You'll still not get anything watchable though.

Bob.

farss wrote on 4/28/2010, 12:21 AM
I think I have the correct answer. I probably should have picked this up earlier, in fact I almost sort of did. The clue is that the blacks are way too noise free, even looking at what you encoded out of Vegas and uploaded to YouTube. I kind of though it was mostly my monitor crushing the blacks.

Thanks to an email from our silent partner I got hold of the original file from the camera and dropped it onto the Vegas T/L and the waveform monitor revealed rock solid flatline black. No camera I know of can record blacks that clean so something must be going on somewhere.
Again at the suggestion of out silent partner I played the original file in VLC and hey, there really is more in the video lurking in the blacks than I can get out of V9.0b. The difference is on this, the office PC, I have installed QT V7.6.6. My Vegas PC is still running a much older version, in part because only V9.0d will work with the latest QT due to a bug in Vegas.
The problem with previous versions of QT and noted in many places on the web is with H.264. QT assumes it will be sRGB and if it isn't, clips. This problem has affected footage from cameras such as the 5D and 7D etc.
So if you want to wrangle what little there is from this footage I think you're going to need V9.0d AND install the latest or later versions of QT. I also tried Ppro and AE and they also use QT to decode mov files and get the same problem.

Bob.