Tips for improving brightness of dark concert footage

Forum|Forum|7 months ago
August 10, 2025
4 replies
369 views

I have some video that was taken at a concert. One of the camera swas on-stage, and that camera had some low-light auto-compensation so it looks great. I have a second set of videos taken from a more basic camera from the audience. It is black around the outside of the stage, and the on-stage portion is somewhate dark (when I'm cutting back and forth between the two camera angles in premiere). Normally I would use brightness/contrast to get the footage where I need to. For this footage I'm not getting a good result with that. Are there any ideas for other ways to improve the quality of dark footage. The stage is illuminated, but I can tell the camera wasn't on a good light setting.

JonesVid

Community Expert

From my experience of using both I think Neat Video does a better job at removing video noise in various scenarios compared to Topaz Video Ai.
Processing is also faster in Neat Video.

I use Topaz for many other tasks though and as you know is great at upscaling and sharpening video.

JonesVid

Community Expert

Yes, Neat video noise reduction plug-in is very effective in minimising noise especially in dark scenes.
They do a trial version with watermark - so you can try it out first yourself.

www.neatvideo.com

G

gigasaurusAuthor

Inspiring

Do you feel neat video would do a better job than topaz?

R Neil Haugen

Legend

Ann's right, we need to see the image.

Past that, in general, if much change of the shadows is needed, that can be hard to do. Especially if the file is only an 8 bit file. As not only will there be video noise to deal with, macro blocking and other artifacting will be an issue.

Sometimes breaking up the corrections between several tools can help a bit. Such as lifting a bit with Curves, with Exposure and Shadows in the Basic tab, a bit with Shadows and Mids of the Color Wheels tab. Small amounts of each.

And probably Neat Video added for handling video noise.

Everyone's mileage always varies ...