Fx Suggestion

TomG wrote on 1/15/2012, 11:53 AM

Hello everyone

I am currently working on a project which has some severe backlight problems (outside light for an interior clip) and was wondering how I could possible tone down the outside light while editing. Is there and Fx or other technique I could use to do this?

I'm using Vegas 10e

Thanks,

TomG

Comments

JJKizak wrote on 1/15/2012, 2:41 PM

Unfortunately most of the FX's will wash/drain out detail and you will never shoot that way again after having to fix in post. (Gamma, gain, contrast, color curves, spotlight, brightness, saturation, and optical tricks.) I have done this many times wondering what I was thinking when shooting at the sun.
JJK

PeterDuke wrote on 1/15/2012, 8:03 PM

Battling high dynamic range is always a problem. You have to expose for the highlights because if they get burnt out there is no hope of getting them back. Underexposed shadows can be lifted, but only a little, else visual noise will be bad. Sometimes a graduated neutral density filter can be used to reduce the dynamic range in a landscape, but probably not much help in the situation you describe.

Vegas comes with a fill-light effect that you can try. I find the NewBlue Video Essentials II Shadow/Highlights effect to be a bit better. Both suffer from loss of contrast in the lifted shadows. Adobe Shadow and Highlights effect in Premiere (Pro or Elements) and After Effects is much better, but requires more work to use.

You can try lightening the scene with Brightness and Contrast. Hopefully this will cause the outside light to be burnt out. You can then use this colour to chroma key to another copy of the clip which has been toned down with Brightness and Contrast. Bear in mind though that once the highlight is burnt out it is gone forever.

There are more tools for this sort of thing for still images. I like and use LightMachine. You could export your clip as a series of images and batch process, but I have not tried this.