Background is too bright!

[Tony]

During the location shoot use a net or ND gel on the windows to tone down the background there by reducing the lighting level on the exterior.

Tony Salgado

[Debe]

Since you probably can’t reshoot…

Use the 3-Way Color Corrector and use the Limit Effect feature (you need to drop down the carat on the lower left hand side, right next to where it says “Limit Effect”).

What I just recently did to tone down some blown-out windows was drag the bottom right luma slider all the way to the right and the left slider to the little hash-mark on the right of the slider. Both stood parallel to each other and perpendicular to the slider (that will make sense when you get in there and see it). Then I pulled the slider for the whites (that’s the one directly under the color wheel) down until the blown out bits were more tame. The edges would be chunky and ugly, but once I got the levels right, I then I went back to the Limit Effect options and dragged the softness slider to blend things in. Depending on how it really looks, you might end up with a white halo around everything. On most of my shots, it blended in fine, but on a few, there were halos that I couldn’t get rid of, no matter how much I tweaked the sliders. I ended up ditching those shots because I had plenty of B-roll to choose from. Hopefully, your shot will blend! This might be trickier if your person’s face has any highlights on it. My stuff was mostly B-roll, so it was much more forgiving. You might have to play with the position of the bottom slider(s) to limit the effect to just the windows. Double check the interviewees eyes as you do this, and any “hot spots” on the forehead or face, or head if he’s bald/balding.

You should use the Video Scope Tool to help you, as well. That’s in the Tools menu.

You also might be able to marry this technique with doubling up the clip on two tracks and using a composite mode between them to affect the luma levels. That’s something you just need to play with in order to tell what’s helping and what’s not. Right-click on the top clip and at the bottom of the pop-up is “Composite Mode”. Pick one and see how it works. Then pick another until you find something that helps. Again, depending on the shots, you might want to darken the bottom layer first. Under some conditions, that just makes things muddier. There’s another way to get to those composite modes from the menu, but I don’t quite remember. You could look it up in the manual or call up the Button List (also found in the Tools menu) and look for them in there.

It’s going to take some time, tweaking and patience, but you should be able to make it better. I don’t know about perfect, but better.

debe

[Don Greening]

[debe] “It’s going to take some time, tweaking and patience, but you should be able to make it better. I don’t know about perfect, but better.
“

…….or you could try the broadcast safe filter set on ‘very conservative’ and see if that does the trick for you. That’s the easy way, but if you’re not satisfied with the result then debe’s way is probably much better albiet more time consuming to set up.

– Don

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