Low-Light Clip Salvage

[wild4trv30]

Upon recently putting together a 40 min. production of a family member’s wedding/reception, I’ve pushed the limits of my Sony TRV30 and my VideoWave III editing software. Despite some technical glitches along the way, the production turned out quite well with the exception of about 8 minutes of footage at the end. This footage is of people dancing in very low light. I did not use an external light on the camera.

When I playback the production the low-light scenes at the end are actually acceptable if I manually turn up the brightness setting on the TV. However, I don’t want the viewers to have to do this each time they watch it.

So far I’ve tried the following to digitally enhance the clips:

Increased the Brightness setting in VideoWave—Result is too grainy.

Converted the low-light AVI clips to MPEG-2, and adjusted the Gamma and Noise Reduction in TMPGENC—This looks good in MPEG, but when I decode it back to AVI (either with Mediator or Premiere Demo) the end result is pixilated (not to mention that the Noise Reduction filter softens the overall picture.

Increased the Gamma of the AVI clips in the Premiere Demo—Looks great in the preview window, but for some reason when I export the timeline to Movie as Microsoft DV file, the output is very pixilated. This is very disappointing since I thought premiere is supposed to be the gold-standard editor.


I would love to be able to end the production with some decent video instead of the dark clips. If anyone has any constructive suggestions on how to salvage these clips either with the software noted above, or some other Freeware, please post a reply.

Thanks.

[SingSing]

Why bother to go back to AVI ?
Can't you stay in mpeg2, or VCD ?

There are free player here, just include them in your disc.

[wild4trv30]

Well, I wanted to be able to output the finished production to Mini-DV and also to VHS (relatives don't have a DVD player yet). I don't have a video out on my GeForce2 Ultra (I think I got cheated since it was an OEM card).

However, if I follow your suggestion, I could put it to SVCD, and output the disc through the DVD player back to my camcorder.

I'll have to mess with it some more, but thanks for the point that sparked the idea.

[MaDmiZe]

I've used VirtualDub on AVi's....with varing levels of sucess.
Just enable the filter for brightness then adjust like you want it then save as a new AVI (with any compression you want) the filter will be applied to the whole clip.

[wild4trv30]

I've messed with VirtualDub a bit, but all of my AVIs are Type-1 and it says it can't process the audio. I could probably extract the audio and put it back in after the edit with another program, but I don't find VirtualDub to be the most user-friendly (although a powerfull freeware app.).

Of my choices at this time, I am leaning toward using the premiere demo with a few of its filters. It's only about 8 minutes of film, and I am getting eager to get this done. I figure if I boost the gamma, or mess with the levels filters along with a softening filter I should get an acceptable (although less than perfect result).

In the process of trying to find a fix, I learned that if I would have used the low shutter digital effect on my camera at a low setting, it would have boosted the light with out too much trailing effect. Unfortunately, I did not think of it at the time of the shooting. I did make sure I used the strobe effect for the electric slide scene though.

[wild4trv30]

MaDmiZe,

I did end up using VirtualDub afterall, and it produced the best results in my tests. I had to first extract the audio and then dub it back in in VideoWave but there were no lip-sync problems. Since I had sync problems with VideoWave in the past, I now use Scenalyzer to output to tape.

Thanks for the advice. I am very pleased with my production. Long live freeware!