easy way to fix a low light video recording

[paleskin]

My city,has the highest rate of crimes among any other cities in our country, our city security level is only at 3.2%

Almost all streets in my city have broken street lights, so It's quite dark at night, and that condition is worsened by thugs who appear mostly at night

I tried to record 2 thugs at night secretly, but the results are too dark to be watched

Could someone help me ?

http://www.mediafire.com/download/6k6ubbod6saz7jb/SUNP0003_Segment_0_x264.mp4
http://www.mediafire.com/download/xgzvybggll8kx17/SUNP0003_Segment_1_x264.mp4

[aedipuss]

not likely. maybe if you didn't have the bright light in the upper left corner the camera would be able to adjust to the low light at night and record something usable.

[jagabo]

Nothing recognizable. About all you see is the back of a guy walking away from the camera in the first video. A brighter version of second video, with noise reduction, is attached. Are these the original videos or did your re-encode them?

[pandy]

My city,has the highest rate of crimes among any other cities in our country, our city security level is only at 3.2%

Almost all streets in my city have broken street lights, so It's quite dark at night, and that condition is worsened by thugs who appear mostly at night

Next time go for local council voting and vote for proper people - it looks to me like classical problem with improper people in council.

I tried to record 2 thugs at night secretly, but the results are too dark to be watched

Could someone help me ?

Aedipuss has right - camera was blinded by light source and sensor dynamics (plus media limitations) prevent to extract any detail.
In future you may consider to locate camera in a way that it will be not blinded by direct light source, additionally you may consider to use IR sensitive camera (most of normal cameras can be modified to allow them to work in IR and you may consider to use extra IR light source to improve overall lighting conditions - camera sensors usually need light, plenty of light...)

[johnmeyer]

You most definitely must point any night camera so it doesn't have a light source directly in the field of view. It simply will not work. Sometimes it is possible to put a small obstruction in front of the camera so that it blocks the light source.

[EddyH]

Bit of a necro-bump, but simply putting some kind of hood over the camera and/or repositioning it a little, if you're able to do that, would probably work wonders. Of course, that's not generally possible with high-level fixed/PTZ security cams, but with a lower level personal camera like this it's a simple mod that would work wonders. In fact if it's handheld, and doing so wouldn't cause unwanted attention, you could use your hand as an adjustable hood and gauge the effect using the camera's screen (should it have one).

I expect this is a phone or basic consumer digital camera, which might not be expected to have particularly good video performance anyway, rather than e.g. a high-sensitivity dashcam or similar? From the grain on the dark parts, it might even just use a fairly simple centre-weighted gain control and already be right up at its maximum (hence the sign being very washed out; if it was actually adjusting for it that much, you'd see more colour and detail), so covering up that corner may not have done anything anyway. Sooner or later they simply reach the limit of what they're able to image, hence Sony selling their old Nightshot cameras as having "###-Lux performance" (with Lux being a measure of light intensity, and the number getting ever lower as they improved the tech, until it went down into single figures - already pretty damn dark - then decimals, then zero once they added the infrared nightshot floodlight) as a sign of their much extended limits. Also if it has a more sophisticated metering system and you blocked the sign out, you might then find it gets misled by the scooter headlights and the brightness goes up and down a lot

But hey, give it a shot, maybe practice with a similar scene when NOT looking to use it for evidence, see if it makes an improvement. It's all experience.
(Also if it IS a digicam, or a reasonably sophisticated phone app / a phone that can have upgraded camera apps installed, and you can't easily shade it from bright objects, see instead if you can try something like fixing the exposure/aperture, ISO sensitivity, EV compensation, metering pattern etc in order to force it to capture a brighter image despite the presence of the sign. I've been able to adjust for dazzling bright objects making a scene very dark, or conversely a mostly dark scene causing the automatic exposure to wash out a brighter object that I actually wanted to capture the detail of, with a surprising range of hardware. Some of them just won't play ball, of course, but it's worth a try...)

As an aside, people who end up either permanently aiming cameras towards scenes with bright light sources like that without considering the "dazzling" effect, and worse still the cretins who set up continually-burning (instead of motion sensor activated) security floodlights - at farms, builder's/scrap yards, roadworks sites, sports pitches etc - without any consideration for where the overspill ends up going or putting proper side-blinds on to prevent it (...it ALWAYS ends up pointing straight along an adjoining road, usually an extremely major, high speed route), have a special place in my own personal hell... .... I don't think that sign is probably anywhere near as bright, but if it is, someone needs to have a word with the proprietor and suggest that his overall operating costs might be a lot lower if he exchanged his own personal sunlight simulator for something more modest yet far better suited to advertising his business to traffic passing through that S-bend who might see it for about five seconds max from a fairly limited distance