[Jim Arco]

When I first started using AE to improve consumer-grade footage, I took it as a personal challenge to see “how much better can I make this.”

I’ve learned some tricks over the last few years and developed a few techniques of my own. I tell folks that I can never make your footage look like it was shot with a high-end camera on a well-lit set, but I can make it look better – sometimes a LOT better.

The latest incarnation of your highlight recovery project is simply amazing. I haven’t done an A-B comparison, but it does look like you have exceeded the recovery capabilities of RAW. It will take me a while to work my way through your project to see what is going on in there.

Great work…. and thanks!

JIM

[Jim Arco]

Shadow/highlight has become one of my most-used effects, particularly for low-light or contrasty lighting, and for footage from low-cost camcorders.

It still seems like I can still get a bit more detail by converting the footage to a RAW image sequence, but shadow-highlight works pretty well for most of the stuff I get.

[Jim Arco]

Thanks for the tip. I have used OnLocation but really didn’t know it had colorbars until just now.

Next question: How do I get the signal OUT of OnLocation to a monitor connected via firewire?

[Jim Arco]

This one bugged me enough to go dig up the manuals that came with AE4 and AE5. (…printed manuals…. remember them?)

Anyway, I could find no mention of any print function.

And thanks guys for the reminders about doing screen captures and printing from another app.

[Jim Arco]

Chris,
As always, I find your projects useful and highly educational. This one is a bit of a render hog (as we could expect with time-warping,) but VERY interesting!

Maybe you can help my feeble brain work through exactly what is happening here. I can see that the lower field is getting ‘stretched’ and motion-blurred on the basis of the upper field in the timewarp comp. Does the upper field ever get time manipulated?

I can’t see where both fields ever got their time cut in half, so that the the stretching works correctly. Maybe time-remapping?

[Jim Arco]

You can actually open the tif or jpeg sequence as camera RAW inside of After Effects.

See Chris Larsen’s tutorial at:
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/larsen_carl/camera_raw_sequence.php
for a full explanation of how to get to the Adobe Camera Raw interface inside of AE.

I have been using this technique for a while to recover highlights, particularly from low-end cameras. Chris Wright’s templates also work some magic if you’d prefer not to convert your footage to a tif sequence first. Neither will give you the latitude of an image captured in the camera as a raw file, but either will make a noticeable difference to footage with blown out highlights.

BTW, you can render footage to a tif sequence using After Effects if you don’t have Photoshop handy.

[Jim Arco]

We have accidently started “specializing” a bit in just this sort of thing and have learned a few techniques that can make the image acceptable. Like you, I started a few years ago with my son’s wedding video and learned ways to make differences in the quality. Low-end video cameras have low end lenses and also suffer from poor colorimetery, noise and audio problems, and most footage has been shot with auto everything (which usually means that colors and exposure levels change with any movement of the camera or subject.)

Of course, you’ll never make that $300 miniDV point-and-shoot look like a $10K HD camera and excellent lens in the hands of a good shooter, but you can make footage look better – sometimes a LOT better.

You’ll still run into the ‘amateur cameraman syndrome’ with excessive zooms, shaky cam, etc but some creative editing can go a long way to get rid of the really bad stuff.

We use Adobe After Effects and also Photoshop, but I’ll assume similar tweaks are available in Vegas. I usually start with shadow-highlight effect. In many cases it is a quick fix for all but the darkest images.

For really dark footage, try layering two copies of the footage with screen blending mode on the top layer. Three layers might be needed for the really dark stuff.

At this point, you should have useable video levels but a LOT of noise. Converting to B&W and/or sepia is one creative solution, but seemed a bit “artsy” for the style of footage I usually get. After Effects Remove Grain (effects > noise & grain > remove grain) can work wonders. You might also want to try Neat Video’s noise reduction tool – the demo I tried was fantastic on noisy video and I think it is also available for Vegas. ReVisionFX and maybe Boris also have NR tools, but I haven’t used them. There are some other ways to deal with noise. A web search will lead you to some techniques involving blurring the blue layer, for instance. However, I haven’t found any that were acceptable for really noisy stuff.

Color grading and matching can make footage from low-end cameras look better, but requires some finesse and maybe a bit of a learning curve. If you’d like to post a bit of footage (or send me something you find particularly challenging) I’ll see what I can do and then post the ‘formula.’

[Jim Arco]

OK, I set it at 1.21 jigawatts (as instructed by Doc Brown) but now my PC seems to be time-traveling in a DeLorean. 😉

Thanks, Chris. Looks good – I’ll have to play with this on Tuesday afternoon when I have a bit more time.

Jim

[Jim Arco]

I’m back from a bit of vacationing and had some time to work with your latest wizardry.

The latest additions make this project even more useful. Even better, working through your project gives me many new ideas about how to better use AE.

Many thanks for taking the time to provide this.

Jim

[Jim Arco]

For me, the secret menu doesn’t appear until I select Prefs, then select one of the Prefs (General, Preview, Display, etc.) It is not one of the items in the first Prefs dropdown.

I am on a PC running Vista and AE CS4.