Inspiring

Question

Gradually adjusting brightness

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
April 7, 2019
11 replies
4481 views

I shot some video of myself outdoors demonstrating some standing exercises, with the camera on a tripod. It was late in the afternoon. I had it all set manually. The f-stop was fine when I began shooting but over the course of the hour the sun got closer to setting (plus went from bright sky to cloudy) and the brightness became much darker than I wanted by the end.

Is this reasonably fixable (without a huge amount of work)?

Thanks!

This topic has been closed for replies.

R

rodneyb56060189

Legend

I just did a fast search on google and came up with these two things...

on this one look at large diffusion video..

Lighting 101 - Tom DW

it's more or less the basics. In reality the silk is used (usually due to your problem of clouds coming in and out ) with artificial lights. Typically the more you can control weather and light, the more you can just shoot as fast as possible. Hence the use of big sound stages.

Big outdoor scenes ( like the cavalry arrives to save the day ), you're stuck with what it is...and sometimes a polarizing filter can help, sometimes ND gradient filters, stuff like that.

What you're doing is very challenging even to those who HAVE the ability to control the light with lots of equipment and crew,

In the old days Kodak made film for cameras and the film came with little paper instructions for suggested F stops and a set ASA. It also suggested, in general, to have sun behind you when shooting. Or overhead, of course.

Jim has a lot of experience shooting outdoors without control of lights and had to get shots the first time

I've never used this in Lumetri, but for small changes in light ( in this case the example involved color temp, but it also works for light exposure to some extent ) this might help. Also Jim recommended the 'exposure' thing... I'd look into that.

New COLOR MATCH Feature in Adobe Premiere Pro is Awesome! (April 2018) - YouTube

I would stick with 24 at 1/48th sec. Looks nice.

30 would put you at 1/60th... faster shutter and need more light. It's mostly for TV ( 30 ).

R

rodneyb56060189

Legend

Oh, one more thing... if you are familiar with this technique...

put your full HD into a 720p timeline... so you can zoom in a bit and / or position frame a little bit … in other words, gives you nice extra ability to tighten up your framing and move the frame around to where you are happier.

720p looks nice on HD TV's... and BD disc, etc.

J

JayNewWebAuthor

Inspiring

Rodney,

Thank so much for all the helpful advice.

Can you please clarify what you mean by "match?"

I appreciate mid-day and overcast. Got it. And are you suggesting not to expect decent results on a totally cloudless day with bright sun?

BTW, I am familiar with putting my 1080p onto a 720p timeline and using that for pan and zoom. I always do that as routine (even if not bothering to pan and zoom). My guru did teach me that early on. I'll have to make sure to use that with this.

Which brings me to another question, please. I shoot primarily myself at my desk with good lighting with a tripod and good mic, and have become accustomed to shooting 24p (1/48). Any opinion on whether I might want to go to 30 fps or 60 fps? Again, it's just talking head. And I don't have much to play with in terms of available lights -- the two lights I have (for now, until I can afford more) are barely enough and I already have the aperture at the lowest number or close to it. (And I don't care what the teleprompter people say -- may 7-year-old mirror is cutting out "some" light.)

Thanks again!

R

rodneyb56060189

Legend

If it's any consolation, the conditions ( lighting ) you shot with would have been very challenging even to a totally top of the line professional film crew with the following departments... camera (DP, operator, assistant camera), grip (with tractor trailer full of equipment for shoot crew), electric (gaffer, generator and tractor trailer full of lighting equipment), sound (mixer, boom man, lav mics).

Really.

My opinion hasn't changed much. Just got a little more fine tuned.

First off ( since you're dealing with h264 4.2.0 with limited latitude ) I'd cut out the parts that are the most offending and save the good parts as much as possible. You'll know soon enough what just can't be done to correct those "most offending parts".

Means throwing away some of the illustrations of exercise, but you got no choice.

You'll see for yourself soon enough how you can only adjust so far before you get artifacts and weird stuff happening ...with that source footage.

Advice: Don't ever trust ANYONE to do work for you via ANY public forum. EVER !

Once you cut your stuff up then go to Jim's advice. Some stuff (once cut into clips) can be fixed somewhat with 'match' frame stuff... then fine tune.

It's going to be a lot of work for you even if you follow my advice and do only the most SIMPLE route to get a product.

Good luck !

P.S. is very nice of you to do this work to help out a non profit group. Next time shoot when it is mid day with nice overcast sky.

R

rodneyb56060189

Legend

I have to apologize. I find my posts resemble those of an old hen making noise about stuff without really solving the problem. All the answers and opinions have equal value and reflect the desire for nice people to be helpful.. yet my posts seem to be sorta opinionated slanted to my own experience. I apologize.

The great thing about the forum is the open quality of it, that everyone can contribute without any argument about the BEST way to solve something.

J

JayNewWebAuthor

Inspiring

I hugely appreciate all the help. To make it a bit more fun for me, I'm not a professional and am using this for, well, I want to say business though it's really to help raise funding for a nonprofit (I may choose to monetize this later, though I expect that will be with new footage).

However, I am experienced enough (barely) to follow all the above suggestions (trained by a guy who actually ran this forum for a time and did beta-testing for Premiere Pro). Knowing which controls to utilize (such as Exposure) is where I'd need advice -- and certainly the advice to choose Continuous Bezier at each keyframe.

I was thinking of posting the video footage but held off until it was hinted that someone here might... well, I don't have the funds for paying a pro to do this right now but maybe my sharing the videos makes it a bit easier to opine on what I might do and even what's doable or not. (And maybe someone will feel inspired to play with this for me as a fun project? )

I sure hope I can salvage this footage and use it. If not, well, at least I'll be further along in my learning curve in how to shoot (and how not to shoot) and how to polish up what I have. (Then, well, there's always limiting myself to shooting indoors, though for this kind of thing outdoors had its appeal and right now I don't have an area big enough for shooting this kind of thing indoors.)

Note that the following videos are accompanied by a separate audio, also included below.

Three original video files, shot with a Canon XA20. 24 fps, 1/48. The first two are the same shoot broken into the two files the Canon created per the size limitations, and were shot at I believe "4.0 ND 1/8." The third was shot immediately after, at "4.0."

A: https://drive.google.com/file/d/101uU5QBwCBUaR6QQn5u9QyQPyjkBrfhB/view?usp=sharing

B: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ONojq4aZFNSQSwkUi5wfCR5b9pkAIVei/view?usp=sharing

C: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1V4zc-dSSEOxBwXtcUHWIJxL_0e9ooxLb/view?usp=sharing

This audio was done with a good Sony self-powered mic with a Sennheiser XLR-to-TRRS adapter I got from B&H to go into my Samsung S9 phone. I was hoping for a lot better sound quality than what I got and am not even sure how well I'll be able to clean this up in Audition CC. At least I can record good quality audio as "narration" in my office (using the Sony mic going into the Canon XA20 does great audio.)

Thank you!!

R

rodneyb56060189

Legend

just for the record, If I could afford it, I would DEFINITELY ask you, Neil, to fix stuff like this if I had the same problem and I was monetizing the product.

R

rodneyb56060189

Legend

That's the only magic solution I CAN THINK OF...

R

rodneyb56060189

Legend

yes, but as cloud comes in the 'edge' of the cloud comes first... dimming very slightly the exposure...and then the cloud keeps coming and the thick part gets there...and now it's downright dark... and then it moves out and eventually gets to the other edge, and it gradually gets brighter …. so if you keyframe the beginning of edge you'll see normal video, suddenly brighter video, middle of cloud matches video without cloud, then you get brighter video as cloud goes away, then you do another keyframe and you get suddenly darker video..

To do what he wants with clouds like that would take about a gazillion years even for a one hour video.

Just my opinion.. hehe... Jim's advice was pretty close to what I imagine he wants... or else cut it up.

Or else spend a lot of time...

there's no magic automatic thing to fix it.

Of course, Neil, there's YOU… so maybe he can send the stuff to YOU and you can do it ????

R

rodneyb56060189

Legend

Back to the beginning.....

==============

Is this reasonably fixable (without a huge amount of work)?

==============

got clouds coming and going (specific clouds randomly coming and going) decreasing exposure ( since you are not behind camera but in front of it, this is not readily adjustable as you 'shoot' from behind the camera ).

Then you got the 'gradual' sun setting.

So we begin with, " what is a huge amount of work ? " Does grading several hours of footage requiring a TON of keyframes fit within your definition of a HUGE amount of work ?

I don't think so.

Cut it up as best you can and apply adjustment of levels to those clips .. and maybe there's some secret 'merge' or 'smooth' or 'match' effect that can improve each clip compared to the preceding one... that would be my guess for NOT a ton of work.

hehe... good luck !

R Neil Haugen

Legend

I've found doing this not that tedious with a lot of clips, where the changes are over time. Adding a keyframed change every couple/five minutes of timeline goes pretty slick.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

R

rodneyb56060189

Legend

Jim has a lot of experience shooting exteriors without having control over the lighting ( a film crew with equipment ) so I'd pay attention to what he suggests.

Your shadows ( and lack of them ) will change due to clouds in and out … but that isn't as horrible as the maybe 2 stop or more difference in exposure that occurs ( depending on type of clouds and density of clouds )…

hehe, sometimes while doing your stuff in future you could 'wait out the clouds' ...stop camera when clouds come in, and look at sun ( I use sunglasses 'reflection' of sun and cloud in sunglasses cause it's bad to look right at sun even in clouds ). You can see how fast the cloud is moving and sorta wait it out or else adjust exposure and start camera again.

Is hard to deal with.

E

excited_Genie16B8

Legend

You can keyframe the Lumetri parameters. Try Exposure.

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