Is there any hope for this footage with Vegas Pro 8?

[Theo Van laar]

Shots that are too bright, willnever become perfect, since they have lost all the details. But still you can try. It is very difficult to judge from a YOU TUBE file how the final results will be. But Vegas can do some amazing things. In the attachment, I show you an example with just a few mouseclicks in Vegas: Levels and Curves. On the right side is your original image and on the left side the edited part. Just to show you that many things are possible in Vegas.
Further corrections could be made with the color correction tool and the secondary color correction tool.

223_birdsadjusted.jpg.zip

Theo

[Graham Bernard]

Hmmm… nasty . .

OK, and until somebody else chimes in here, what I did was take a screen grab off of the You and placed it on a Vegas timeline.

To see exactly what was going on I magnified it in Pan/Crop and notice that that halo on the white parrots is made from a blue (on the outside) and turquoise (on thew white of the bird).

I tried futzing with 2nd colour corrector. not really controllable, but then I tried colour corrector and removed some of the saturation – not what you want to hear, I know, it does reduce the colour impact, but then I then “pushed” towards the red/yellow for the High wheel and yellow/green on the Medium wheel and the same for the Low wheel. This has the effect of reducing the blue/torq influence, but this has the unfortunate result of making the look a bit, well, nicotine! I then added a further EXTRA additional Colour Corrector but, and knowing it was a wee bit yellow, this time I pushed towards the blue.

I think it is better than the halo, and also the bird looks correctly whiter than bluer! And I’ve kinda reduced the halo . ..

Well I tried . . here’s the result

Grazie

[Graham Bernard]

Nice one Theo!

Did you add some “Increase Contrast” in Colour Curve? I tried that too, but I got back some more blue too.

Grazie

[Theo Van laar]

Hi Graham,

‘Did you add some “Increase Contrast” in Colour Curve?’

no, all settings were made manually.

Theo

[Don Kimball]

Hmmm… If I remember I shot this footage on an evening when the light was not optimal and used the poorly lit blacklit feature on my Sony DCR VX-2100 cam. I have gotten some nice footage with this cam on not so well lit situations but shooting in these cases just didnt pan out so well.

I was hoping there was some sort of tool in Vegas that either would simply take away the contrasty type of element to the footage… or like a surgeons knife somehow remove the blue halo around the birds. Both the white cockatoo and black one.

I wasnt clear on how you accessed what tools you used Theo. I am willing to toy around with this considering I wont be going back to Australia soon to get more clips!

Thanks folks and if anyone else has any ideas I would love to hear them too!

Don

New to Vegas… excited and intimidated at the same time!

[Shawn Bossick]

go to the secondary color tool, use select effect range pen to select blue halo only on your clip, use the mask next to see what got selected and what didnt, use the three sliders to adjust settings of the mask, saturation, hue, and luminance, once mask is at its best, just the blue halo,insert 2nd fx chroma blur, insert it before the color wheel,select medium on chroma blur, blur positioned 1st, wheel 2nd, now use your wheel to change the color of the mask, desaturate it, change the hue, this will help, why you got this blue halo is the real problem though, I personaly dont think any program will ever get rid of that, only tame it, GOOD LUCK

[Stephen Mann]

Looks to me like a compression artifact. Do you have the in-camera sharpening turned on? This can create a color shift at high contrast transitions. Does this show up on the AVI file in the preview window?

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Don Kimball]

Hi Steve:

This problem actually shows up in the original footage when you simply use RCA cables to connect the cam to a television set. Of course it also shows up in Vegas’ preview window as well on the timeline. I think the culprit might partly be my inappropriate use of Sony VX2100’s backlighting compensation tool. I am fairly confident I had this on during the shooting which was done in rather poor lighting.

Sometimes the backlighting tool can make the difference between getting footage of a rare species when the lighting is pretty poor and you only have one opportunity to shoot.

Thanks for your imput!

Don

New to Vegas… excited and intimidated at the same time!

[Don Kimball]

Hi Shawn:

I am going to have to definitely roll up my sleeves and do some homework on this one for sure! Those are a good number of steps for a total neophite like myself. The first obstacle I have run into is as follows when I follow these steps you recommended:

a. I select plugins Color corrector secondary
b. I drag this to my view screen which opens up the videoFX
Color corrector secondary screen/mode
c. I then select the eye dropper icon for select effect range

Now the problem is that this tool is very inaccurate and instead of giving me a precise drawing instrument that I can use to select the blue unwanted halo surrounding the cockatoo I get a large rectangle that takes me nowhere.

Whats more if I select the Show mask feature… it then hilights a large rectangle area that is not even where I drew on the video preview using the select effective range tool.

I must be doing something wrong and may be missing some important steps that perhaps you may feel I know already? Just guessing and puzzled.

Thanks for your help though… I am one of those recipe type thinkers ie. first add sugar, then flour, then water etc.

I am good at that method… grin..

I am very appreciate of folks who are trying to help me and willing to do what I can to rescue this footage.

Cheers and thanks!

Don

New to Vegas… excited and intimidated at the same time!

[Shawn Bossick]

ok you are doing something incorect, add the fx on your actual clip, when you select the, effect range tool, then make sure you select the blue halo from your preview window, which is also set to best, and not preview, or draft, you also can drag the tool to get more than 1 pixel. this is a powerful tool, and there will be things down the road you will be glad you know this techniqe, also once you have selected your range and everything is dialed in like I described eairler play with the chrominance to shift the colors, again your blue halo will never disapear, this will only tame it, less bright blue