Underexposed Footage, Need Advice on Correction

[nedcam]

Hello,

I was going to shoot a talking head job in a friend's studio with my camera but for emergency reasons I had to use his FS100 at the last minute, no time for pre-pro, etc. I had never seen one before, he set me up using his 24" computer monitor for focus and exposure and it looked great ON THE MONITOR. No wave form unfortunately.

So far I transfered the native files through Clip Wrap to Apple Pro Res 422. I'm using FCP7 (I have no other programs) on a 27" iMac and I just can't get it looking good using the basic Brightness & Contrast Filter. I know it should be OK but my post skills aren't that great. I'm guessing it's 1 to 1.5 stops under at 1080/30P. It was a simple black background with a gradated light for a grey glow in bottom half of frame.

Any ideas?

Thanks

 

[Woody Sanford]

I can't say for certain on FCP7 as I have been using Premiere pro since like 98'. I have used quite a few other softwares and I've always found the "Brightness and Control" options, tools, filters to not be good at getting the job done at all.

I find it best to adjust contrast and brightness in a color correction/grading tool. One where you are adjusting the Lift, Gamma and Gain. I'm personally fond of RGB curve tools that have a master. I'm sure you can google up a tutorial on the color tools in FCP7 but if you don't really care for them much Da Vinci Resolve lite is free and very easy to learn. You've already transcoded so it's no real big issue to round trip through Resolve. Adjusting exposure and contrast is the first step in a lot of peoples work flow for grading so you'll see that in quite a few resolve tutorials. So if you download resolve and spend part of an afternoon learning to fix this, you'll open a lot of doors for yourself.

 

[Dermot]

i would look at what the import options are, the camera shoots full range (0-255 in 8bit) if the profile is set to do so, and it seems like you saw full range on set, but your software may have cliped 0-255 to 16-234, and you would have "lost" that information between 0-16, and no cc tools can get back what is not there

Options might be;
- try diffrent import settings in FCP but i think you are out of luck there
- switch software to something that maintains full range (FCX / Media Composer / Smoke / Lightworks all do, not sure about Pp and FCP legacy)
- cut in FCP and conform from the camera orignals in something that maintains full range (Resolve / Scratch / SpeedGrade / Smoke)

 

[Woody Sanford]

i would look at what the import options are, the camera shoots full range (0-255 in 8bit) if the profile is set to do so, and it seems like you saw full range on set, but your software may have cliped 0-255 to 16-234, and you would have "lost" that information between 0-16, and no cc tools can get back what is not there

I agree that kind of clipping does affect contrast but trying to get it back with a brightness slider is just going to raise everything at once and then trying to adjust contrast with a slider is fruitless. No way of knowing what picture profile was used or how blacks were adjusted or what highlight levels were. However, if you are trying to recover the footage a brightness/contrast control is to limited. You can get some contrast back in mid tones if it was clipping and adjust gamma some to increase perceived brightness. Since a black background was used you really only have to worry about blacks being crushed on the subject. Brightness and contrast controls can also be very destructive to highlights and clipping in software only makes that worse, so I always avoid using those controls. They are to easily destructive.

 

[nedcam]

I found the 3 Way Color Corrector works great. Also a top editor told me using Clip Wrap to convert AVCHD to Pro Res can make it dark also, so I am importing without first converting.

Thanks

 

[Razz16mm]

Hello,

I was going to shoot a talking head job in a friend's studio with my camera but for emergency reasons I had to use his FS100 at the last minute, no time for pre-pro, etc. I had never seen one before, he set me up using his 24" computer monitor for focus and exposure and it looked great ON THE MONITOR. No wave form unfortunately.

So far I transfered the native files through Clip Wrap to Apple Pro Res 422. I'm using FCP7 (I have no other programs) on a 27" iMac and I just can't get it looking good using the basic Brightness & Contrast Filter. I know it should be OK but my post skills aren't that great. I'm guessing it's 1 to 1.5 stops under at 1080/30P. It was a simple black background with a gradated light for a grey glow in bottom half of frame.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Is your iMac set to sRGB color space and calibrated to SMPTE color bars for that? You may just be seeing a gamma difference between an sRGB monitor used on set and the default Apple color space on your iMac.

 

[Scott F]

Also a top editor told me using Clip Wrap to convert AVCHD to Pro Res can make it dark also, so I am importing without first converting.

Thanks

Can anyone else weigh in on that? Most of my clip wrap experience has been positive but I did have a similar experience to post #1 earlier this summer. Looked good on field monitor but dark in fcp.

Op, what was your solution, just using log & transfer? I'm confused, sorry!

 

[Dermot]

Can anyone else weigh in on that? Most of my clip wrap experience has been positive but I did have a similar experience to post #1 earlier this summer. Looked good on field monitor but dark in fcp.

I think it may be both acucrate and inaccurate, in my tests ClipWrap was completly transparent i when tested re-wrapping to h.264, but i did not test it for transcodeing, so he may be right (or wrong) in some cases, and correct in others... so too broad a brush was used.

Still thinking it's worth seeing if the information between 0 & 16 was truncated by FCP, and still lives in the camera orignal files, my profiles all use -15 for black levels and both FCP and Pp seem to destroy the shadow detail by clipping the data range rather than scaleing it.

But it is possiable that the footage was transcoded, and became clipped in that process...

Pretty easy to see by opneing up digital meter inside OSX utilities and putting an eyedropper on a shadow in the orignal and the transcode?

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