overexposed video

jeremyhockey wrote on 3/3/2004, 2:24 PM
Hi,
I'm a newbie with Vegas 4.0 and I'm having a difficult time fixing some video I shot that is overexposed. The clips are of a summer camp I work for; everything is fine except for their white shirts which are so bright, they're glowing. I've spent many hours of color correcting to no avail. Is there any way I can darken just their shirts without darkening the whole frame? Here is a link to a quick ten second sample of it to give you an idea. THanks.

www.imageevent.com/jeremyhockey/homevideos

-Jeremy

Comments

farss wrote on 3/3/2004, 2:34 PM
You could try the color curves FX HOWEVER as much as I hate to say this you'll never get it to look even 90% OK.
What happens is you've lost the detail in the highlights and there's really no way to get that back, in other words all the bright bits are at 255, you can reduce them to say 235 but there're all still the same value.
You'll be able to get rid of it looking quite so washed out but not much. As you try to pull the highlights back they just become grey. By tweaking the gamma curve you'll get it a bit better but you hit a point where it gets worse.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, been there, done that. Wasted days on it even though in my head I knew there was no hope. Just ended up wasting a lot of time and clients money (he wanted me to keep trying!).

You can MAYBE attempt to restore some detail using the Convolution Kernal however it's a lot of work and the results I could get were not that impressive. It'll only work if there is a slight amount of detail left in the highlights but your stuff looks very far gone.
jeremyhockey wrote on 3/3/2004, 3:55 PM
OK-so I've given up hope of ever fully correcting these clips, but I was wondering if anyone knows how it happened in the first place. My camcorder usually captures great video except for this one day. Was my white balance off? How can I make sure it doesn't happen again?
JackW wrote on 3/3/2004, 4:19 PM
It's probably not a question of white balance but rather of exposure. Try using the zebra bars on your camera next time you're shooting in a lot of light. If you're getting lots of zebra at 70, switch to manual iris and stop down until the zebra bars only show on the brightest highlights in the image.

Also, if you can, use a monitor so you can get a good look at the image.

If possible, get your subjects out of the bright sun and into an area which has soft mottled light. The images will be generally more pleasing if you do.
JJKizak wrote on 3/3/2004, 4:34 PM
If you have portions of the subject (white dress) in the dark and in sunlight
the camera will key on the dark areas and automatically brighten up the dark areas and superbrighten the white areas bleaching them out. The more expensive cameras handle this much better but its best to move the subjects into more accommadating light as mentioned in the above posts. Once its done the wrong way you can never restore it unless you hand paint each frame.

JJK
cervama wrote on 3/3/2004, 4:38 PM
Try doing a color pass and maybe it will work, who knows this might just do the trick. If you have the time, why not all u can do is try.
farss wrote on 3/3/2004, 6:00 PM
Probably your camera doesn't have zebra and many of th eother fancy stuff. Monitor in viewfinder and learn what overexposed looks like. If you see it happening almost all cameras will let you dial the exposure down a few stops, usually labelled something like EE adjust or whatever.

For outdoor shooting under is pretty well better than over, only because mostly what you want is the stuff in the brightest areas.

Of course if your trying to shoot something in the shadows the reverse applies but there does seem to be a bit more latitude in the blacks.