Overexposed... now what ??

1. Esplanade77
   Member

   

   Hi again!

   I did some symphonic orchestra shooting this past week-end, and even though I did my color balance (it looked good on my LCD) once the tape transferred into my Premiere Pro CS3, I see that all the faces of the players on stage are overexposed...

   Is there a magic formula to take off the white and filter the frames ??

   Thank's again for any input!

   Posted 4 years ago #

2. thebergs2010
   Member

   

   i dont know about premier pro cs3, but there should be some sort of brightness/contrast filter on there. just try to play around with that

   Posted 4 years ago #

3. bezhanh84
   Member

   

   Not sure about Premier Pro but do know what you can do. Like thebergs2010 mentioned above, you want to play with your brightness and contrast. You will end up with a high contrast video but it'll eliminate (not fully) some of the white. You want to lower the whites and play with the blacks. Good luck. I wish you were a Final Cut person so I can explain better.

   Posted 4 years ago #

4. jburkhart
   

   

   I'm sorry to tell you this, but in video "Once it's white, it's gone." While you can take your footage into a color corrector and adjust the contrast and levels, and maybe get a tiny bit of the detail back, you can't reconstruct anything that is completely blown out, because the data is just not there, it was never recorded.

   A good rule of thumb when shooting video is to always err on the side of underexposing your shot. It's very easy to get more details out of the dark parts of your video frame. It's nigh-impossible to reconstruct detail from over exposed video. So when in doubt, take the exposure down a little. (FYI this rule is reversed if you're shooting on film).

   Also, as you're finding out the hard way, LCD screens are not the best judge of brightness. Some of the higher end camcorders have a Zebra stripe function, that puts a warning striped overlay on parts of the frame that are over exposed, use these if you have them. These rely on the camcorder's electronics, and not the LCD, so are very accurate. If your zebra stripes are set at 100, you can easily see which parts of your frame are so white that they're gone, and expose accordingly.

   Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I do feel your pain. This has happened to every videographer at one time or another.

    

   JB 

   John Burkhart
   Editor-in-Chief
   Videomaker

   Posted 4 years ago #

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