Lighten up a bit can ya? :)

[xinjingqiao]

I have about 2 hours of digital video that was shot in an auditorium - a Christmas program in a school for disabled children. Is there any fairly simple way to lighten up the footage? The video cam was too far back from the stage to take advantage of the bright light of the stage. I have been using TMPGenc so far. I have found that the results I have obtained so far are better than with Ulead 7.0. Is there any way to lighten this up and still retain contrast? What is the general name of the kind of program that will do this?

[Cole]

Another program that has contrast and brightness controls are the filters in Virtualdub.

https://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=Virtualdub

Have browse through the guides and see if there is anything that may be of use. Although, I don't know if you will get any different results than that of TMPGEnc.

Good Luck.

[celtic_druid]

AVISynth using levels() or tweak(). Although assuming that you encoded to mpeg2 you can use mpeg2requant to change the brightness without re-encoding.

[reboot]

Tmpgenc. Click Advanced tab, simple color correction, and try the sliders.
Encode a minute or two to test.