Is this video even possible to brighten?

[vic711]

I posted a video of my band on our myspace page and it's incredibly dark. I've tried Adobe premier along with a bunch of freeware programs and the brightening/contrast tools did not help much at all. Why is it that in Windows media player the brightness and contrast sliders work so well, but you can't save these changes? Is there a program with similar results that i can save the changes so I can upload the video back on the page?

take a look at the video now...keep in mind I used windows movie maker to brighten it a tad bit and added an old time effect to it as well, but I have the original video and its only 20MB, it would be great if I could send it to someone and they could adjust the brightness?
the link is below,

www.myspace.com/californiasmile1

[jagabo]

Just about every video editing application has brightness and contrast controls. But your highly compressed source makes it unlikely you'll get anything decent out of it.

[edDV]

I posted a video of my band on our myspace page and it's incredibly dark. I've tried Adobe premier along with a bunch of freeware programs and the brightening/contrast tools did not help much at all. Why is it that in Windows media player the brightness and contrast sliders work so well, but you can't save these changes? Is there a program with similar results that i can save the changes so I can upload the video back on the page?

take a look at the video now...keep in mind I used windows movie maker to brighten it a tad bit and added an old time effect to it as well, but I have the original video and its only 20MB, it would be great if I could send it to someone and they could adjust the brightness?
the link is below,

www.myspace.com/californiasmile1

You probably crushed the blacks somewhere in your capture-editing-encoding process. Once the blacks to dark grays are chopped off, you can't fix them with contrast and brightness.

What camcorder format? How did you capture-edit-encode?

Premiere should be able to capture the camcorder tape and filter for contrast. As you "brighten" expect noise to become excessive.

What format does MySpace expect? If they want 16-235 DVD MPeg2 and you give them black at zero, they will be setting black at 16 thereby chopping the lower 7.5% blacks.

[vic711]

hmm...im not too bright with technology so alot of what your saying is chinese to me...i know it was my friend's digital camera that the video was taken on, and I still have the original video file that I didn't edit if that makes a difference. i think acceptable formats for myspace video are mpeg or mpg

[vic711]

theres no way to save the windows media player contrast and brightness settings? they work fine, i juts cant save them

[edDV]

theres no way to save the windows media player contrast and brightness settings? they work fine, i juts cant save them

No that is a viewer not an encoder.

How does the tape look when played to a TV? You can match that with Premiere without filtering by sticking to DV format (IEEE-1394 capture and project settings) and encoding to DVD standard MPeg2. Brightness and contrast filtering can be done as well.

[jagabo]

theres no way to save the windows media player contrast and brightness settings? they work fine, i juts cant save them

No. WMP doesn't process and save video.

If your source is high enough quality (even if very dark) you might be able to get a viewable picture but it will be very grainy. Here's a dark frame from a DV camcorder. Original on the left processed on the right (half size views):

[vic711]

edDV, i've already uninstalled premier and my cpomputer is running very slow...is it possible i could send you the vid and you could save it in that format? its <20mb

[jagabo]

Upload it to somewhere like http://www.yousendit.com/ and past a link here. I'm sure several people will take a look at it.

If you can get an acceptable picture by adjusting WMP's settings someone can do the same with some editing software.

[vic711]

I uploaded the video to YouTube, heres the link.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9J33anYOps

yes, the WMP settings were fine, they were very grainy and almost black and white in appearence but i don't care because everthing could be seen well.

[jagabo]

Youtube reencodes everything to FLV. That further messes up the video. It's best if you upload your highest quality source to YouSendIt or some other file transfer site.

http://www.filecrunch.com/
http://www.megaupload.com/
http://www.yousendit.com/

[edDV]

edDV, i've already uninstalled premier and my cpomputer is running very slow...is it possible i could send you the vid and you could save it in that format? its <20mb

No, sorry, I'm on the road.

[jagabo]

The 5 MB FLV download from YouTube has too little detail left to get anything useful:



The conversion has eliminated all the details in the dark areas.

[vic711]

alright, uploading to filecrunch now

[vic711]

here it is

http://www.filecrunch.com/file/~7ed73t

[vic711]

btw appreciate everyone's help, im not sure what id do without you guys, thank god for forums

[jagabo]

The page says the file is 44 MB but when I download it I only get 31 KB.

[vic711]

im uploading it to megaupload, says itll be done in 20 mins

[vic711]

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=EKP9EUX7

[vic711]

anyone?

[jagabo]

Using AVISynth I was able to get something like this:

#ASYNTHER MPEG2Source (mpeg2dec.dll)
MPEG2Source("MOV01675.d2v")
Levels(0, 1.5, 64, 0, 255, false)

The important thing is to perform the Levels() filter while the video is in YUV format. Otherwise (ie, if you convert to RGB first) the darker portions of the picture become completely black, losing all the detail.

I'm not sure what format you would want this back as. The source is somewhat unusual with MPEG 1 at about ~3000 kbps, 640x480, 25 fps, 32 KHz audio.

[12Quidkidinnit]

I'm just having a go now with Premiere Pro 1.5. I've used the auto contrast effect, and it's rendering now, but it's taking ages. (only on 343 frames out of 3141 at the time of writing)
I'll post back if it's any good.

* Edit - what format do you want it in if it is an improvement ?

[edDV]

Just test on a representative clip.

[12Quidkidinnit]

Wmv 512 kbps format. Don't know if it's any better. The walls look like blood

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=4OZ1IEQ0

[vic711]

that one looks better than it was, but the screens jagabo posted look brighter, could you upload that jagabo? i dont really care what format as long as it's accepted by myspace or youtube

[jagabo]

Here's a small version of my attempt:

http://download.yousendit.com/2CE6D1B14D77E226

10 MB Xvid/MP3 AVI.

[kissvid]

Hi,

I was reading about your problem. You might want to also try Vixen software. I had the same situation last year and this got me through it with moderate success. It was better than trying to use the brightness and contrast in premeire. Here is the link to them.

http://www.xentrik.co.uk/

You can also download a 7 day free trial to see how it works for you.

Marc

[vic711]

its opening as an mp3 with no video in windows media player

[jagabo]

its opening as an mp3 with no video in windows media player

If you're talking about my AVI file you probably need the Xvid codec or Divx codec.

[vic711]

looks good, thanks alot jagabo. is everyone who watches it on myspace going to need to have the xvid or divx codec installed for it to work?