Ideas for editing oversaturated footage

goldentwig wrote on 12/3/2007, 8:27 AM
I received some MPEG-2 clips from a client who shot them on one of those new HDD camcorders. He wants me to edit it into a piece for him, but a lot of it is oversaturated and very bright. I'm playing around with the "Brightness & Contrast" filter, but do any of you have any other suggestions of tips and tricks I could try on the clips?

I'm using Vegas 8.0a with no additional plug-ins.

Thanks!

Comments

Grazie wrote on 12/3/2007, 8:35 AM
"Stand away from Brightness & Contrast Fx!"

1/- Try Colour Corrector and "desat".

OR . .

2/- Try Colour Curves and manipulate the each of the colours.

That should flatten it nicely!

Wanna give me a still?

Grazie

Cheno wrote on 12/3/2007, 8:38 AM
Try your Curves fx... if it's not "too" bright or overexposed, you may be able to tone it down a bit. If this doesn't help with saturation as well, Your HSL effect will help you reduce saturation

cheno
Spot|DSE wrote on 12/3/2007, 8:44 AM
And don't forget the Saturation tool, it can be used to bring down specific ranges of saturation.
rs170a wrote on 12/3/2007, 8:45 AM
Try the Secondary Color Corrector as it has a Saturation level control.

Mike
Grazie wrote on 12/3/2007, 8:50 AM
How would the "Levels Fx" deal with this?

G
goldentwig wrote on 12/3/2007, 10:11 AM
Wow, thanks for all of the great suggestions!

Did I use the correct terminology earlier to say that the video is really washed out? A lot of the "desaturation" options are just taking out the color but not really helping the areas that are way too bright.

Here's a screen grab of one of the shots:

http://img517.imageshack.us/my.php?image=image0et2.jpg

GlennChan wrote on 12/3/2007, 11:36 AM
You can use levels to bring down the overexposure.

A tutorial for Vegas (the info only applies to 8-bit projects, not 32-bit ones):
http://www.vasst.com/resource.aspx?id=a7a8c403-64dc-420d-97d0-90d2f8de9fc1
Grazie wrote on 12/3/2007, 12:46 PM
Woah! Having now seen the example, IMHO, there is far more awry than you initially posted.

Grazie
rs170a wrote on 12/3/2007, 1:00 PM
I agree with Grazie.
This is a case of severe over-exposure and no filter in the world is going to bring back any of the detail :-(

edit: IMO, take Glenn's advice and use the Levels control to lower the maximum brightness so that it doesn't "yell" at you.

Mike
UKAndrewC wrote on 12/3/2007, 1:48 PM
There is a levels filter for VirtualDub that works better than Sony's as you can offset the centre of the input levels.

But if you can, it really needs to be reshot.

Andrew
Grazie wrote on 12/3/2007, 1:52 PM
UKAndrewC? "as you can offset the centre of the input levels." - do you think our friend is going to be up to speed with this excellent advice? I might/kinda get it . . but . . . ? Yeah?

Anyways, let's see if he/she does ..

Grazie

UKAndrewC wrote on 12/3/2007, 3:46 PM
Grazie, I hope you meant the filter, rather than VDub ;-)?

With the Sony levels FX you can stretch and compress the input black and white points. The mid-range greys are altered proportionally between the two. Greys lighter than the mid-point get lighter and below, they get darker.

With the VirtualDub levels filter you can alter the mid-point, which gives you greater control over the point at which mid-greys get lighter or darker.

Having said all that, the color curves filter in Vegas will give you infinite control of the brightness and contrast levels.

Andrew
busterkeaton wrote on 12/3/2007, 4:38 PM
Did I use the correct terminology earlier to say that the video is really washed out? A lot of the "desaturation" options are just taking out the color but not really helping the areas that are way too bright.

Saturation properly refers to the amount of color.
Brightness refers to the amount of light