Low light editing

Billae wrote on 4/24/2006, 6:27 AM

I am editing video of a dance with low lighting. Any recommendations on how to lightend this up without alot of noise. It's not real bad, I just need to give it a light boost.

Comments

jrazz wrote on 4/24/2006, 6:42 AM

Do a search for "low light" and you will find tons of threads on this topic- even recent ones. There are some 3rd party plug-ins that work wonders and johnmeyer wrote some scripts for this. Again, just do a search.

j razz

craftech wrote on 4/24/2006, 8:47 AM

Adjust Gamma only and see how it looks.

John

johnmeyer wrote on 4/24/2006, 8:54 AM

Here are some threads:

Levels vs Brightness/Contrast

Rescuing horribly shot video

low light footage

JohnnyRoy wrote on 4/24/2006, 8:57 AM

You might also want to read Correcting Exposure in Sony Vegas Part One and Two on the VASST website. Glenn Chan does an excellent job of showing you how to recover from underexposed video.

~jr

Billae wrote on 4/24/2006, 6:41 PM

Thanks everyone, I adjusted the gama and used mike crash's Noise filter. it worked out out well.

Laurence wrote on 4/24/2006, 9:39 PM

I've found that putting the Mike Crash noise filter and a gama adjustment filter on a dedicated track and dragging darker footage to this track makes fixing dim and noisy footage pretty quick and consistant.

Laurence wrote on 4/24/2006, 9:47 PM

Also I've found that if you capture HDV as individual m2t clips with HDVSplit, gama correct and denoise them with a track plugin, then batch convert this timeline to Cineform clips using an "events to regions" then a batch render script, you avoid much of the dynamic range problem of the Vegas Cineform codec being 8 rather than 10 bits. As far as I can see, this is the only case where the bid depth even is an issue and this fixes it.

Another trick is to set up several tracks based upon how much brightening and noise reduction you need for several levels or darkness correction. Then you can drag clips to whichever track has the closest match for how much correction you need.

GmElliott wrote on 4/25/2006, 12:17 PM

Push the gamma and pull the blacks. (ie Raise the gamma and crush the blacks a bit to compensate)

I usually crush the highlights a good deal as well. It depends on how far off your exposure was.