Is there a way to exceed the envelope settings?

wings wrote on 3/30/2008, 10:17 AM
I rendered my movie and noticed that there aer a few areas that need tweaking.

On a bigscreen when the DVD is played on a projector there are a few sections of video that a a little dark from being shot on a different camera. Is there anyway to get them brighter when the Opacity and the Video level are already at 100%.

I also have a few spots on the voice track that are a little quiet and you can't hear them very well compared to the music track. I have the volume in the envelope up at 6.0 dB already in those areas. Most of the voice track is OK so I really don't want to boost the whole track.

In the boxes at the left, do you usually use 100% on the video and 0 dB on the sound tracks as a starting point?

Thanks!

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 3/30/2008, 1:11 PM
You should always have the video opacity set at 100% unless you have some artistic reason to make the video transparent. The opacity setting is never intended to be used to adjust the brightness. Reducing this slider will make your video see-through, and what's on lower tracks will then be visible through that track. Since you probably have nothing else below that track on your timeline you will be allowing the black background to show through, and this may be making you think that this slider darkens the video.

If you want to adjust the brightness of the video then add one of the video processing effects to that event. The best one to use is Color Curves. You can adjust how bright/dark or contrasty the output is by dragging the diagonal line up and down at various points. If it seems a little unintuitive to you there is also a Brightness & Contrast effect which is much simpler to use, but doesn't always return as good results.

Audio:

1) You can turn up the track gain all the way to +20dB. If that's sufficient to increase the volume of the quiet parts enough then you can use the audio envelope to drop the louder points back down to the proper level.

2) You can split the audio event so that the quiet sections are separate from the louder ones and then right-mouse-button click on the event, choose switches / normalize. This will increase the loudest peak of that event up to 0dB. Tweak with the volume envelope afterwards.

3) Add the compression effect to the audio. This will lower the louder peaks so that they'll be more in line with the quieter ones. Then use the track gain or the volume envelope to bring everything up evenly.