Need advice getting started - color correction or lighting

[Batchman]

Hi there,

Back in the 80s and 90s I did a lot of videotaping of live stage shows at Disneyland and Walt Disney World. About three years ago I started transfering my videos to mp4 through an Ilo DVD recorder. These days I am starting to upload some of my videos to YouTube. But because of age, and the dark conditions in some of the recording locations, some of the videos are kind of dark, and the colors are kind of faded and bland.

I'm new to the concept of video editing, but am looking for advice for good free software to use, tutorials, things like that, to try and start learning how to tweak my videos for better picture quality. I know there's a lot to know and a long way to go, but anybody have advice on how I want to get started on these basics of things like brightness and color saturation?

I want to bring out the natural colors, not just force things into being brighter but unreal, and I don't know where to start. Anybody point me in the right direction?

[redwudz]

I would look into VirtualDub. It should do what you want and more, depending on the format of your video. MP4 is just the container name, it doesn't tell much about the content format of the video. But VD is a good start.

Lots of tutorials and many filters for VD. A few here : http://www.infognition.com/VirtualDubFilters/

Most times with filtering, less is better. Often very dark areas and very light areas have little information and lightening dark areas will make them look 'muddy'. You have to play with the filters a bit to get the best combination. Another downside is you will have to re-encode, and that always results in quality loss. It's all a trade-off.

[smrpix]

If you want to get very precise with color correcting Davinci Resolve Lite is free and tremendously powerful. It is limited in the codecs it accepts and requires a decently hefty system, so check the specs before you leap in.

[Batchman]

Unfortunate, vdub doesn't want to work with the dvd video, but I'm looking into the Davinci ... thank you!