Lighting Nightmare - BillyBoy? Others?

chewbonkay wrote on 4/23/2002, 6:20 AM
I'm editing a 2 camera (GL-1) wedding ceremony and need some help. The 2nd camera is un-manned, set to auto everything, and put on the alter favoring the bride's side (shooting over the grooms shoulder). The shot looks great except the church put a BRIGHT spot light right on the bride?! All other lighting is natural. Everyone else in the shot (the pastor, bridesmaid, best man) are perfect but the bride is burned out. Since this is the 2nd camera it's not as critical as if this were my main shot, but it's still important.

Any suggestions? I've tried playing with some filters and custom curves but I can't correct for the burn-out.

Thanks much.

Comments

swarrine wrote on 4/23/2002, 6:33 AM
If you increase the brightness/contrast on the bride, the rest will become overexposed. Maybe you could focus on the bride and frame or blur out the rest giving a "dreamy" feeling of the bride only on that shot.
BillyBoy wrote on 4/23/2002, 4:09 PM
I haven't tried myself but the manual (the full version as a PDF file) has chapter 13 which covers Compositing and masks. Since I'll assume the bride didn't move around a lot creating a mask for a specific portion of the burned out section should be fairly easy. Masks are typically used to 'mask' an area but since you'd want to reduce the harsness of the lighting you probably would want to use the invert feature of the mask generator so you actually effect the masked area by applying filters to it as oppossed to protecting it is the normal case.

Just a general comment. I'm glad to see that you can now purchase a printed manual. I printed and bound one myself from the PDF file sometime back and it was well worth the effort. The manual is very well written, loaded with illustrations and gives answers to possible solutions and gives good details on the finer features. Also do find time to read the onlilne help which is also well done.
SonicTamara wrote on 4/23/2002, 4:15 PM
In response to your general comment -- thanks for your kind words. Those of us who work on the manual and online help appreciate your positive feedback. :-)
RichMacDonald wrote on 4/24/2002, 8:52 AM
Burned out is burned out. If you have no variation in the color spectrum, nothing you do will correct it nicely. Confirm this is so by checking that these colors are really white. You can also decrease the contrast to see if any additional variation appears.

Assuming you can adjust the brightness/contrast/curves to make the bride acceptable (forgetting the rest of the shot), then you can move on to masking/blending. Basically, you would have one top track without adjustments and a second track of the same footage with the settings adjusted to make the bride acceptable. Then, you wipe out the bride on the first track to let the second track show through.

(I do this all the time with photos with high contrast. Scan the picture twice with high and low brightness, overlay them, and erase the parts of the top pic where I want the second pic to appear. A lot easier with a scanner and static shot. I've never tried it with moving shots, plus there is no scanner to help you.)
BillyBoy wrote on 4/24/2002, 4:26 PM
Without seeing what you mean by "burned out" which really is a relative term, any advice is at best a guess. Like Rich said if you mean much of the shot is pure white or near it then of course there are not enough pixels left to shift around. If instead it is just over done compared to the rest of the video then you can also try adjusting the gama. With 1.000 as the default you may wish to lower to .900 or maybe even .800 or so. The inverse for dark video would be moving up to 1.100 1.200.
While in the levels filter try moving the output end to the left a litte. Generally you don't want to mess with gama much, but since the section of the video you're trying to improve is already so far out of range, it can't hurt to experiment. :-)