Dealing with badly lit scenes...

What do you find are the best ways of dealing with and correcting poorly lit / amateur-looking scenes?

Using Color Corrector to enhance the highlights works pretty well. It gives the picture a subtle "lift" without whiting it out. Unfortunately, with bad lighting on video, there's very little leeway for enhancing mids or darkening blacks to increase contrast.

Gamma Corrector also works better than Brightness and Contrast. Try a .85 setting, which tends to even out your dark/light areas without too much washing out.

Strangely enough, the FCP manual recommends that if given a choice, you should underexpose video rather than overexpose it. That sounds like utter hogwash in to my experience with video footage -- it's always been: Overexpose to get more detail, take it down in post. Does anybody else have experience that supports the other view -- underexpose is better?

With digital video or photography if you over expose you loose all details and you can't recover it. You shoot for the lightest area that you want detail.
With film is the opposite (negative film) you shoot for the darkest area that you want detail.
In Peter's case like Derek said, use the 3 way color corrector. Start with the middle tones, correct the whites and add contrast with the blacks. Then add color to compensate.
There is no way to make a clip look as good as if it was expose correctly. but you can make it look a little better.



God Bless,

Douglas Villalba
director/cinematographer/editor
Miami, Florida

[www.DouglasVillalba.info]
[www.youtube.com]
[vimeo.com]

Of course, if you overexpose you will lose detail, but if you underexpose, your entire shot goes to hell! That's why I was astonished to see the FCP manual recommend underexposure. On the other hand, I've used Color Corrector to correct a shot that was white-balanced and exposed for the interior of a record store, with the camera shooting out into the street. This is Los Angeles in the summer, under full sunlight! All you see is a sheet of blue with a couple of eyeholes and nostrils, so I figured it was incorrigible, right? Behold, when I took the highlights down and used RGB Balance to take down the blue, faces began appearing out of the sheet of blue.

By contrast, I've never seen seriously underexposed video footage (2-3 stops, probably) acquire any detail, no matter how much filtering you apply.

Also, you could use this trick.

On the timeline, click the clip you want to adjust. Press Apple - L to unlink it from the audio. Then select just the video portion and, holding the option and shift keys, drag the clip up to V2. This should give you an exact copy of the clip above the original.

Now control-click (or right mouse click) on the top clip. This will bring up a contextual menu. Select 'Add" from thr 'Composite Mode" menu. Adjust the opacity of the top clip to taste.

If the shot is extremely dark you may need to make several copies.

another thing you can do, is to re-light the scenes..

i mean in post.

you can create "power windows" in fcp, using the mask shape filter, or a gearbage matte filter.
double the clip up on itself like jude says,
add the masks to define the area you're concentrating on and grade to taste, lighter / darker to re-light the scene.

i did this on a music video which got it's mood changed from bright and coloufull to dark and moody.
a lot of room for the extreme in a music video, of course, along with a more abstract aproach, but the same things aply in a more real situation, too.

the worst thng about bad lighting (apart from making people look bad) is that they didnt know how, or what to light, so you can help the shot out by re-balancing, and creating shape and focus in the shots

going black and white, is always an instant "look" too, that can help bad shots by simplifying them.

Nick and Jude both had some wonderful points (that "Add composite" thing is wild. I gotta try that sometime.). I would like to add that most of the time, especially with video, the problem isn't even so much bad lighting as...no lighting at all. As in, sometimes we get footage from amateur videographers who think that you can't have a "look" on DV, don't do their homework with tests and don't work with post in terms of filtering, and so the footage is bland and has the feel of home video. Whereas if you have a strong expressive look, you often don't even need film-look filters to make people think it's film. I've shot Hi-8 (!) footage where I overexposed dramatically, to hell with Range Check, and also framed in a very unorthodox way for video by using lots of Kurosawa-like wide shots, very stable camera moves, and starkly iconic mise-en-scene. The results fooled quite a few people into thinking it was film. (Small monitors obviously helped!) And on another music video, we had a great DP who did a very prominent green filter over the whole thing. When I first saw the footage, I blurped to the director "In the Mood for Love" and she was elated, because that's exactly what she and the DP were going for, and they were so good at it that all I had to do was saturate some seaside stuff even more to make the sky and sea more blue. The results look wonderful and filled with personality. I'd take video with personality any day over blandly slick 35mm film.

I'm a great fan of digitalfilmtools.com 55mm filter package. There are 2 in that group that could help you: 1) overexpose, which will bring back a good bit of luminance to dark material and 2) Light!, which is the best light correction and adjustment filter I've been able to find to date. The amount and quality of image control possibilities are excellent. You can demo for free, buy a key to unlock.

www.digitalfilmtools.com

hth,
Clay

Everyone, thankyou.

You have all added to my ever increasing bank of helpful editing information. Appreciated...