FCE and overexposed footage

droliff

droliff

Active member
Hi all,

I've got Final Cut Express 4.0 and am trying to adjust some over exposed footage that I shot on my Nikon D7000. I'm pretty new at most of this and am using the 'color corrector' filter to make adjustments but am not having much luck. Is there a better way or am I SOL? lol. Here's a few seconds of the footage with no adjustments: Emily sample footage

Thanks.

Dennis
 
Hi, Dennis.

The challenge with overexposed footage like that is there's too much detail lost in the blown highlights that can never be restored. Unfortunately, only a couple of things can be done and neither will restore the footage to a place that's much better.

You're also working with FCE, which has no scopes, making this a little more of a guessing game.

You can try to bring up the blacks a little, and bring down the whites just to try and tame levels that are off the scale (over 100IRE... but without scopes that's hard to gauge). Other than that, everything's a bit blue-ish, so you'll want to use the Balance and Hue wheels to correct that. Again, without a scope, you're going to have a hard time getting the flesh tone accurate.

This is a lesson in exposing properly in-camera.
 
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Hi Alex,

Thanks for the input. I'll see what I can do with the adjustments you mentioned. I shot other footage of this project where the exposure is fine. Unfortunately I didn't pay enough attention to the 'interview' footage and it is overexposed so, even with the adjustments, will probably not cut together too well with the rest. This is definitely a lesson in properly exposing in-camera.

Dennis
 
Yeah... it's much easier to correct underexposed footage than it is overexposed. You can get it marginally improved, but that's about it.
 
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