Incorporating Stills/Brightening Things

kdi001 wrote on 4/12/2006, 4:23 PM
Using vegas 6.0:

Just got back from a trip and would like to incorporate some still images into my hour long video footage project. The stills are are on CD. Must I resize the images to 720x480 (since that is my project properties) in order to avoid the “black bars look” around the image? I would like the large stills to fill the screen.

Lastly, the shark exhibit at SeaWorld was a bit too dark for my video camera. In the Video FX tab of Vegas, I have used the Brightness effect to lighten things a bit; looks fine; I was just wondering if there was a superior way to do it in Vegas. How do you brighten dimly lit scenes without losing quality?

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 4/12/2006, 4:31 PM
Resizing stills depends on how large they are and how many of them you have. If they're not much bigger than the project size then don't worry about resizing them. If they're large but you only have a few then again don't bother. If you do resize then the correct size is 654.54x480, not 720x480. But, it doesn't really matter as you can have Vegas fill the frame without you having to resize them at all.

Place the still image on the timeline, open up Pan/Crop, right-mouse-button click in the cropping frame and choose "Match output aspect". This will eliminate the black bars. If your stills are mostly the same size & shape, once you've done the first one press Ctrl-C to copy, select the next, right-mouse-button click and select events to end, then right-click again and paste event attributes to set the same cropping to all of them. You can fix up the few that are different individually.

To brighten a much better choice is color curves. This maintains the dark shadows and bright highlights and allows you to "slide" the middle tones to a brighter range.
Spot|DSE wrote on 4/12/2006, 5:15 PM
If it's an issue of being too dark, you'd do better using Levels first, then determine if you want to punch colors up or not. Curves will work too, but you'll likely see more noise creep in.
GlennChan wrote on 4/12/2006, 11:34 PM
This might help:
tutorial on using levels

Both levels and curves are good ways of raising brightness. I believe curves can mathematically do the same thing as levels (there may be some rounding error, which is technically slightly off). To the eye and in practice, it more or less can do the same thing. Getting the interface to do that is a ridiculous process though... curves tends to put a curve in things, whereas Levels does everything linearly/"straight".

Anyways, you can get Color Curves to give slightly superior results in raising 'brightness'. If you make the curve slightly s-shaped, this will mostly leave the shadows alone. The shadows contain the most noise... stretching them out (like via Levels) will make this noise more visible.

I like the interface in Levels though... it can be faster and is simpler to use. I'd just use it first.

Brightness&Contrast isn't that great of a filter in my opinion. Levels or Color Curves will give better results.
kdi001 wrote on 4/13/2006, 5:14 AM
Thanks for the replies. Dale
SonicClang wrote on 4/13/2006, 8:58 AM
To cut down on render time you could open the pictures up in a simple Paint Shop Pro type program and adjust the brightness there. For still shots that's what I like to do, otherwise if you have too many real-time effects running rendering takes a lot longer.