Help Compensating for Camera Overexposure

rtbond wrote on 1/9/2008, 9:32 AM

Folks,

Would anyone have a few minutes to look at a sample clip and advise on the best Vegas plug-in and settings to compensate for a camera overexposure? I have place a link to the clip below.

I was doing some casual recording of a performance from my seat in the audience and discover about half way through that the camera (Sony HDR-HC1) was in a manual aperture setting, with the aperture wide open. Now I have received a request from the performers for a copy of the recording and would like to clean the exposure problem up, to the greatest extent possible.

I tried making adjustments with the Sony Levels plug-in and Saturation plugin, but with only very modest results. The skin tones are the most disturbing portion of the overexposed scenes. I am using Vegas Pro 8.

Thanks!

--Rob
rob.bond@gmail.com

Overexposed (HDV) Clip: http://download.yousendit.com/07447EEB3186624C

Comments

baysidebas wrote on 1/9/2008, 10:34 AM

Unfortunately, once you blow out the highlights there's not much you can do. You've probably exhausted the available remedies in what you mentioned. Not to be a Monday morning quarterback, but weren't you monitoring what you were doing? Doesn't your camera display zebra stripes? One thing I've learned in my years of shooting both film and video is to use the acronym FAST before rolling film or tape.

Focus
Aperture
Shutter
THINK

rtbond wrote on 1/9/2008, 10:50 AM

Thanks.

As mentioned in my post, this was some causal (point and shoot) recording so I was not paying a great deal of attention to the camera settings.

--Rob

MH_Stevens wrote on 1/9/2008, 11:02 AM

What is blown is blown. By that I mean the areas of overexposure are so over-exposed to have no detail in them and as such never will. The areas of overexposure are not great and you can make the picture look much better. First use Sony Color Curves to get the maximum amount of detail in both the light and dark areas and then get rid of that red hue using the Sony color corrector.

earthrisers wrote on 1/9/2008, 8:53 PM

It's analogous to recording audio at way too hot a level, and getting terrible oversaturation and clipping... you can't "un-clip" a signal that's already distorted because of being too hot. You'd have somewhat better luck making improvements if you had UNDERexposed (analogous to recording audio very quietly), but once "clipping"/white-burnout has happened, you can't recover the details that have been lost.

DJPadre wrote on 1/9/2008, 9:10 PM

levels are your friend

GlennChan wrote on 1/9/2008, 11:13 PM

You can recover a small amount of highlights via the Levels plug-in.

My tutorial:
http://www.vasst.com/resource.aspx?id=a7a8c403-64dc-420d-97d0-90d2f8de9fc1

2- You can also try painting in a better flesh tone color via the Secondary color corrector.

DJPadre wrote on 1/9/2008, 11:18 PM

forgot to mention... magic bullet is also your friend...

Shergar wrote on 1/13/2008, 12:41 PM

I took a look at your footage - a lot of the blowout is retrievable.

I pulled it into VP8, 32bit mode, applied Levels with Output End set to 0.5 - the colors look fairly unclipped according to the RGB Parade.

After that I agree with DJPadre... a spot of Magic Bullet (Bleach Bypass always does it for me...) and no-one will care about the skintones

rtbond wrote on 1/14/2008, 2:53 AM

Thanks Guys. I used the Levels tools to reduce the levels and Color Curves to reduce Reds further.

Magic Bullet is a bit pricey for my purposes.

---Rob

Shergar wrote on 1/15/2008, 5:06 PM

"Magic Bullet is a bit pricey for my purposes."

I could be wrong, but I think you can download Magic Bullet Movie Looks HD to work with Vegas from this website. Do a search for "movie looks" and see what happens. It was bundled free with Vegas 6