Your levels swing from blown whites one second to crushed blacks the next -- no salvage I'm afraid, as suggested use a manual exposure level next time.

I am using a drift HD. It is a simple HD video cam.
As far as I know there is no way to turn off the auto-exposure compensation.
I have brought up the issue with the company.
They just put out a new firmware (the last firmware was supposed to be an improvement!!), I will have to wait to try it.

In the mean-time, I really would like to rescue my videos.

Anyone else have anything more constructive to offer?

"In the mean-time, I really would like to rescue my videos.

It would be nice if it was as simple as someone having more constructive advice. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

In digital photography, once highlight and shadow detail has been lost to clipping at either or both ends, there is no recovery possible. Your clip is rife at both extremes. It is a nonrecoverable hardware issue. I've been doing this commercially for more than forty years.

Unfortunately, neither your camera nor the GoPro has manual exposure control, as far as I am aware. It is simply a matter of the amount of light falling in a circle near the center of the lens.

However, there is a little more detail available than your Youtube video seems to show (not much). Undoubtedly, you have not converted the RGB levels your camera shoots to the REC 601/709 luminance levels required by Youtube's player and most others. If you will upload the same clip somewhere in your original camera format, I will be pleased to show you how to recover up to another 14% of detail and luminance range from your original video. Again, not much in relation to what you have already lost, forever. Post your link in a reply should you be interested in learning from this experience.

Best of luck.

I have already used the Sony Vegas software on previous videos with some improvements in the brights, darks and everything in between. I know it can be done. It is just that the filters have to be applied only where needed, so that you do not change the levels that you do not want to alter.

As is often the case on forums, the question is mis-interpreted or mis-read.

I am NOT trying to recover blown out brights or the lost darks (at 0,0,0 RGB) I am aware this is impossible after years of competing in digital photography events!!
This was not my original question, rather someone who replied brought it up.

Rather I want to NORMALIZE what lies in between the darks and the brights so that their levels do not swing back and forth. Example, the terrain goes from being acceptable in exposure to being 1 stop too dark. I want to normalize all the terrain video so that the difference in brightness becomes less, maybe 1/3 or 1/2 a stop. This would be a big step. And I would like to do it without having to insert a separate filter/effect every 30 seconds through the video.

I can easily bring up the dark landscape levels to a pleasing level, but I have to remove that effect when the landscape becomes bright again, then reapply it when the landscape gets dark......... over and over.... I would like something that I can say... normalize this range so the mids are here, period. and it does it for the whoe video. This wouold be a good start, just normalizing the midtones. Maybe then I can focus on doing the same for the brights and the darks (no, not recovering what is blown or lost, but working with the values that can be manipulated).

I am curious. How does one extract 15% more detail from the Drift HD video? Studio RGB to Computer RGB??

Have you ever looked at keyframes? At the bottom of the effects window is a tiny little timeline. You can click the <+> button to add new keyframes wherever you want the effect to change, and then change the effect settings there at that moment in time. The effect will then gradually change from one set of settings to the next as playback progresses from one keyframe to the next.

While it will require somewhere between 60 and 120 keyframes,(guesstimate range) , this is the best option/recommendation so far.

Thanks! I will look into this.