Hope for too Dark Footage

[Ian Newland]

You could try increasing gamma and gain in the color corrector FX it will help but will also reveal the noise in the blacks. That’s a pretty bright background behind, so that was obviously the original problem.

Cheers Ian

[John Rofrano]

You can use the Color Curves to bring out the mids and leave the highs unchanged.

Just adding this:

Produced this:

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Steve Rhoden]

Don, ive researched this issue extensively, due to the fact
that proper lighting is of the utmost importance when shooting
your video.
So when you do have dark footage or footage like yours whats the
best solution?…Ive tried tons of filters & plugins in both Vegas
and After Effects (especially Curves)…and actually found out that using the “LEVELS” filter in Vegas yields the “best” results of all.

Spend some time tweaking it until you get familiar…im sure
you’ll get great result.

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Creative Arts Director and Film Maker.
Project Samples at:
http://www.youtube.com/hentys

[Ian Newland]

Don, i suggested color corrector controls as you will probably want to increase the color saturation after lifting the levels and by the look of Johns sample that’s what you will need to do. Everyone has their favorite way and every situation is different, try them all go with the one that gives you the best results.

Cheers Ian

[John Rofrano]

Actually, what we recommend on the VASST Absolute Training for Vegas+DVD, Vol. 4: Color Correction with Sony Vegas training DVD, is that you place filter chain of B&W, Levels, Color Correction, & Color Curves in that order. What you do is apply the B&W filter, open the Video Scope and adjust the Levels to expand or shrink to 0 – 100. Then turn off the B&W filter and use the Color Curves to adjust the high’s, lows, and mids. Then finally, open the Color Corrector and adjust the saturation and any other color correcting. I was trying to keep it simple in my post and Color Curves gets you the closest to a reasonable shot all by itself. I learned a lot from this DVD from Glenn Chan and Douglas Spotted Eagle and can highly recommend it; not because I work for VASST but because it really demystifies the art/science of color correction.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Mike Kujbida]

I don’t work for VASST and I highly recommend the DVD that John is referring to.
I bought it a few years ago and was astounded at what, after over 30 years of doing video, I still didn’t know 🙂

[Ian Newland]

Another all in adjustment plugin for Sony Vegas is the free AAV Colorlab plugin. https://aav6cc.blogspot.com i find this is all i need sometimes especially for adjusting for white balance from Canon cameras and also independently adjusting the 6 colors and their levels.

Cheers Ian

[Don Kimball]

Many thanks Ian, John, Steve, and Mike:

I used levels and color corrector and am quite pleased with the result. Naturally I will need to run some tests on a television monitor rather than computer display but it looks good I think. What do you folks think? Below some screenies to show what I did.

http://www.polytelismedia.wordpress.com

[Ian Newland]

If you could squeeze a little more color into it and maybe drop the gamma a bit more might improve a bit, but that’s on MY monitor what’s on yours is what counts.

Cheers Rambo

[Don Kimball]

Hmm…

Seems like a fine line between making the image too dark so that you cannot see the red cheek patches on the cockatoo and having the body color too light. I adjusted slightly. Here it is.. hows this?

http://www.polytelismedia.wordpress.com