Vegas needs automatic video gain

D

David W. Richardson

Chapelgrove Films
I'm struggling in Vegas 8.0c with some footage that was shot with the camera on auto exposure. There are places in the footage where it grows considerably brighter or darker because of someone wearing all white. (No, it's not a wedding.) The wild brightening and darkening of the image is extremely distracting, so I'm having to compensate using keyframes. It's very tedious and aggravating.

What Vegas needs is some sort of 'auto level' effect. I want to be able to pick a frame in a clip and set it so that Vegas takes the average brightness of that frame and automatically adjusts all the other frames in that clip to match it. Sure would make life a lot easier!
 
That's a lot more difficult than one might think. Premiere has a auto level effect that can average over time and it doesn't work very well at all. In fact, I've never seen an auto level effect that works well enough that I would consider using it for anything serious. That said, the best auto level algorithm that I've seen so far is this free plugin for Virtual Dub from MSU:

http://www.compression.ru/video/smart_contrast/index_en.html
 
Search for "mike crash auto levels" plugin. It's free and might get you there, I think it may be based on the virtualdub plug, but Mike's works in Vegas.
 
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