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Activity Forums DaVinci Resolve Advice on too dark footage

  • Advice on too dark footage

    Posted by Beth Davis on May 7, 2023 at 1:07 am

    We had an event that we shot last week. We didn’t know the lighting situation and the camera operator ended up having to shoot it alone at the last minute. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time to set up lots of additional lights and there was little to no ambient light.

    I’ve purchased a few filters for denoising and for exposure correction, but I’m not getting anything that I can actually use. Do any of you with more in-depth color grading/correcting experience have any ideas of how to fix this?

    Beth Davis replied 1 year, 9 months ago 4 Members · 6 Replies
  • 6 Replies
  • Michael Gissing

    May 7, 2023 at 8:19 am

    I’m a big fan of Topaz AI to uprez, denoise and getting rid of compression artifacts. What camera & codec was it shot on? Your reference is mp4 which makes it hard to get an idea of what the original looks like. Have you used anything on the clip you uploaded?

  • Beth Davis

    May 7, 2023 at 1:41 pm

    It was shot with a Sony FS700 using an Atomos Shogun using Rec.709 settings. We were at an event, and had NO idea that they weren’t lighting it at all other than the fire. I’ll definitely check out that filter. Sadly, I wish I had asked before I bought the NeatVideo plugin for $160.

  • Tim Neighbors

    May 7, 2023 at 4:16 pm

    I love the Neat Video noise reduction plugin. However if the footage is captured too dark, at a certain point, detail just isn’t there to work with. You should definitely be working with the original footage out of the camera and hopefully you’ll find more detail preserved there. I’ve heard good things about Topaz’s upres’ing and I wonder if there are any new AI tools available yet to create detail where it was lost. good luck!

  • Beth Davis

    May 7, 2023 at 5:11 pm

    I’ve tried the 1080p footage from the camera as well as the Atomos footage. In my experience, the Atomos footage is always better because it has a higher range. Using the Neat filter definitely helps, but you’re right, there’s just not enough info there for it to work with.

    We also had an alternate camera on lock down and it was a Canon DSLR. That footage looks better than any of the other but it wasn’t on the whole time. Ugh.

  • Michael Grenadier

    May 10, 2023 at 1:07 pm

    I’ve had some great results with the Neat plug-in but sometimes you need to dig deep into the interface to get the best results. You might see if there’s someone here who’d be willing to do a short clip and then find out what would be involved in having them actually work with the footage…

    Had a similar situation where I was promised a full run thru of the event to figure out camera positing and settings and… it didn’t happen…

  • Beth Davis

    May 11, 2023 at 2:34 pm

    Yeah, that plugin has a lot of features that I just don’t know what to do with and their instructions are pretty basic. How/where would I go about submitting it for help? I’m new to that. Usually I can fix whatever I need on my own, but this one is above my pay grade. 🙂

    Thanks for your help.

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