Comments

discdude wrote on 8/25/2001, 8:09 AM
You can use the color balance filter to desaturate the blue. Just mess with the sliders until it looks nice.

The best program for setting color balance/brightness I have seen is Photoshop. Their "Levels" control is great. They have little eye droppers you can use to select the highlights(whitest part of the picture), midtone and shadow (blackest part of the picture). They also have an "Auto-Levels" function which works OK.

Selecting what is supposed to be white and what is black usually snaps all the other colors into place. Unfortunately, no video program has this functionality, not even Adobe's own Premiere (which even has a "Levels" filter, just without the eye-droppers). I'd really like to see this in Video Factory or at least Vegas.
wvg wrote on 8/25/2001, 9:04 AM
I agree with discdude, you can't beat Photoshop for adjusting levels either with slider controls or using the eye dropper. Another neat program who's main function is a thumbnail generator and all purpose graphic file sorter to keep track of all your images is ACDSee which also has an enhance feature providing basic image enhancement including adjustment of both white and black points either by slider or manually selecting values from 0-255. Not for videos, for still images.

I also find treaking the video in Video Factory with the HSL filter very useful in pumping new life into less than perfectly shot videos. A little adjusting goes a long way.

A levels control would be a nice addition to VF in a future release.

I'm aware of one little video editor that has such a feature now. Can't beat the price, FREE, its called VirtualDub, a nice addition to your tool box if you love to fiddle. The author even offers the source code of his program for you C+ programmers out there. You can sample a whole video or go frame by frame and adjust levels in a video very similar to how you adjust levels in Photoshop using sliders.


discdude wrote on 8/25/2001, 11:41 AM
I agree that Virtualdub is great, although it really isn't a NLE (Non Linear Editor). I still use the capture module a lot (although I can't wait for it to support DirectShow captures). In addition, I started to use it to sync up audio. For some reason, the audio and video streams of files seem to have different lenghts lately (which screws up VF royally). Using Virtualdub restores both streams to the same length (+/- 1 frame). Virtualdub has lots of nice video noise reduction filters (something not usually found on NLEs). It works really well with analog capture although Vidcap is still better for DV caps. It makes a great companion to VF.

Virtualdub is free and can be downloaded at http://www.virtualdub.