I videod my nieces wedding recently ( unpaid - only for practice - it's the first serious videoing I have done ) The DJ insisted in keeping the hall lights dimmed and used his disco lights during the bride/groom first waltz. The vid has turned out very dark and I want to lighten it up. I filmed with a Canon XM2 and I'm using NVE3 to edit it but I can't find any brightness/contrast adjustment (Is there one? ) I also tried premiere elements 2 but that gave the vid a washed out look. Can any one help me ??
Come on in Crusty You've helped me out before !!!
Alex C

I have littel doubt that there will be a brightness and contrast control. It's a basic tool and teh NLW shouldn't be marketed without it IMO.

What I'll add though is that when you do increase the brightness you will likely incur and emphasise noise into your video and the colours will be a bit drab.

Some things/ideas you might want to try to get rid of the noise are...

1) Apply a slight blur to the footage to reduce the noise.
2) add the footage toa second layer and try applying the blur to the second layers and then adjust the opacity down a little.

This might help reduce noise.

As for the colour being a littel drab, there's not too much I can tell you to fix this. Try adjusting the contrast and level controls a bit to see what you can 'bring out'.

Just a few thoughts, dunno if they'll help much though.

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I'm not young enough to know everything!

There's only a few filters that might work for this. They are in the 'color filter' menu -




I haven't used these much, so you'll have to experiment a bit.

On my PC, NVE3 has become unstable, so I'll probably reinstall it soon.

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Thanks guys I'll give both your suggestions a try. Hope I never have to depend on videography for a living
Alex C

I'm dealing with some footage from a gig where the lighting idiot takes all the lights down leaving only red.

I use brightness and contrast to bring it all back up then colour levels to tone down the red. - I also apply a 50% black and white filter to it.

The result is not graet and very grainy but it does the job.

As alan suggested a very slight gaussion blur will soften the grain but you only want about 1pixel worth or 2-3% blur depending on how the application applies the blur.

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Virtual dub has a good noise filter.

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