Fixing Poor Lighting in Post w/Vegas - Help!

ken c wrote on 8/10/2005, 4:17 PM
I'm hoping someone can give me a few pointers on how to clean up this video footage in Vegas 4 .... before I get into heavy editing work later this week on the 2 days of raw footage...

Take a look at this quick 20-second (11megs, 720x480 mpg2) video clip of camera 1 and camera 2 footage from my seminar:

http://www.MegaSeminar.com/seminar2cam.mpg

(audio not synced yet for 2nd cam, I know..and ghost from cam 1 since it looks like I didn't vid-composite envelope all the way down)

Now the 2 softboxes weren't balanced perfectly against overhead lighting, giving a bit of a "halloween" look to the footage, with too much light from the bottom...

Question: What would you do re spot contrast or brightness or other effects in V4 to help fix it in post? bump up contrast and/or brightness tweaks, somehow? other? the 2nd cam footage looked ok, but the 1st cam a bit shadowy since too much lower lighting..

appreciate any tips... will send a highlights seminar dvd to anyone w/useful tips (remind me when they're out) as a thank-you for your time and expertise... I'm still very new to color/lighting correction in post/NLE w/Vegas....

thanks,

Ken

Comments

Liam_Vegas wrote on 8/10/2005, 4:56 PM
Just making it a clickable link to allow easier download.

http://www.MegaSeminar.com/seminar2cam.mpg
ken c wrote on 8/10/2005, 5:00 PM
hi Liam, thanks.. !

ken
johnmeyer wrote on 8/10/2005, 5:01 PM
Tough thing to fix. The highlights look pretty hot, so you can't bring them down much (because it doesn't look like there is much detail there).

The tool I would use is Color Curves and would fool around with the upper part of the curve, trying to get his forehead to be a little brighter, so the highlights don't "take over" as much.

It does look a little ghostly, the way it looks now.
Grazie wrote on 8/10/2005, 10:59 PM
Ken? - I'm on the case! If I can come up with something, I'll email you - yeah? Great puzzle!

Grazie
ken c wrote on 8/11/2005, 5:24 AM
Thanks John, Grazie, appreciate it...

Hey it's curious, looks like the 45 degree angle footage is better (from my cheap 3-ccd panasonic gs120) than from the a/v company's expensive broadcast cam ... the 45 degree footage (2nd clip) looks clearer, brighter, better color saturation, clarity...
what do you all think?

Should I request that the a/v company use FX1s/VX2000s or ? cameras for next seminars?
farss wrote on 8/11/2005, 8:24 AM
Biggest problem is that the higlights are in the wrong place, sure they're a bit too hot as well. But what you need to do is bring the rest of the face up while bringing the hot area under the chin down and the way to do this is with masks however they probably need to dynamically change shape and move with the subject and that's well outside the capabilities of Vegas. You might have a chance with Combustion or Digital Fusion but even then you've only got 8 bit data to work with so things can get ugly. Not to say you couldn't get it a bit better with an aweful lot of work, just that you'll never get it 100% right.
Now the image that the better camera recorded and assuming it's a full broadcast camera, mightn't look quite as good but what you'll probably find with it is that if you can get it into a high end system then more can be done to pull it into line.
Bob.
Grazie wrote on 8/11/2005, 9:11 AM
I created "dynamic masks" ( I didn't even know they were called that - thanks Bob! ) by making 5 tracks of progressively more precise targeting of the "highlights". I DID get somewhere, and then lost the will to live! Huh . ..

I was able to get a "moving" mask, made from the highlights, as a really nasty ChromaKey-able red. I could exchange this for a nasty ACID green to be certain.

Grazie

huh . . just discovered the spell check in Google Bar!
ken c wrote on 8/11/2005, 10:09 AM
good idea re masking, if it was for shorter clips, but I've got 14 hours of video to produce... so I'm looking at just some easier "contrast center" (what's that?) settings or brightness, to smooth it out..

ken