The original .MOV file is here:

Oddly enough, anything I have done in Vegas Pro has ended up making it worse than this untreated version for some reason.

Uhhh, a video posted on Youtube is neither "original" or "untreated." It has been rendered to another format by the Youtube servers.

However, in this case it looks too blocked up to do anything with at all. It is impossible to restore detail that isn't there.

Give the filters from Mike Crash a try.
You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear but you might be able to actually see something.

Mike

Wow! At first I thought the screen was black. Don't use brightness/contrast for adjustments. Use Sony Colour Curves to bring up as much detail as you reasonably can. I expect then you'll have a very noisy image and you might do some good with Mike Crash's noise reduction filters. End result might be usable.

you may already know this, but wow, that's terrible. I thought the footage was just black at first also, until I started to see a little something showing up.

I'm afraid you're in a bad way there.

Good luck.

Dave

Cameras require light and you had none at this shoot. Trying to improve on this is just going to be an excercise in frustration. Next time, turn on a light bulb.

Back in 2009 you got this reply about camercraft:

3) Lighting or knowing how to use available light are also very important, here again also knowing the lighting requirements of your camera (good or bad on low light, etc).

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?Forum=4&MessageID=685202Here's the feedback you had then[/link]

You would appear to be having a fundamental problem with understanding just what your camera can and more importantly CAN'T do? Maybe it is time to do some further reading and maybe take a course or two.

I really started to understand this craft by working with a Boss who made Wedding videos. Lots of mixed lighting scenarios and pesky clients. Might I make a suggestion - presently you don't appear to have an idea as to what is illuminated and how much harder you are making your life. Get some valuable tuition under your belt. Our cameras - non-military - at best can do much. But they will never, in my Lifetime, cope with what my eyes and brain can cope with - it just ain't there yet, if at all.

By submitting this footage you are making a real plea for help. Here's mine - get some tuition - right NOW!

Things will get better, I promise.

"Turn on a light bulb" can also mean having an idea - and here that means to do better too! You could also try a little Gain. Yes I said Gain! If it is a low light environment adding gain is not blasphemy. Plus we have great lil plugs that can smooth out much of the creepy-crawlies.

Good luck and act on people's advice - thanks for sharing and now go out there and push your knowledge envelope.

Grazie

OK so it's dark in there, try this:

Put the same video footage onto 2 event tracks one on top of one another.
On the top track click compositing button and select "Add" and on the bottom track leave it on "source Alpha"

If there is any detail in there you might be able to recover something but don't expect toooo much. I hope this helps.

Does anyone else who was there have video of it? Even a cell phone video may have more usable footage. Anything from anyone who had a cheap camera with automatic level controls?

John

"Are there other techniques that can be tried for this?"

If it wasn't so morbidly underexposed and out of focus I would have said convert it to B&W. Sorry mate but it is beyond redemption by several stops.

Bob.

With poorly lit video, I boost the brightness and contrast in Sony's FX Brightness and Contrast, and then use Neat Video's Denoiser. This technique can be really effective at making dark video at least viewable without too much horrible noise in the darkest areas. But NeadVideo's plugin will cost you... I think $99 for HD.

Something odd is going on with this. Thanks for all your feedback by the way. This was a concert in a nightclub and a Zoom Q3 was used. I am totally aware that the footage is bad. HOWEVER, there is a LOT more information visible in the video when I watch the original "mov" file in QuickTime after getting it from the Q3.

For some reason, importing the ".mov" into Vegas immediately makes it worse, eliminating just about all the additional images, faint as they were. Take a look as these stills from 3 different versions of the same video:

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 when a very kind soul on this forum snagged the version from YouTube and ran a quick filter or two.

The pic on the right is the result after the same kind soul took the .mov version and ran filters and noise reduction on that. 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?

Any ideas?

Thanks again.

Ken

PS - I will post the YouTube question as a separate thread.

Ken,

You might try to bump up the light level using the Add option of the Compositing Mode. This may give you more detail in the shadows.

Lou