My video is a touch too bright!
 

I hope this isn't too far off the wall but here goes. At least it's worth a try!

My main track on the timeline is too bright (but no overly so). I was hoping that there was some relatively simple and easy way to correct this state of affairs without too much muss and fuss.

I have CS2 and CS3 to work with.

What I want to do darken the look of the entire project/contents on the timeline a modest amount at one shot!

Is that possible?

Does PP have any tools to do such a task?

Alternatively, are there any tools on Videohelp.com that would work?

Thanks all for your pitching in on this particular perdicament.

Bruce

Did you check this on a properly calibrated external monitor? That is the only way to really judge your footage.

(1) What Harm said. Be sure you are really too bright and it's not your monitor fooling you. (2) If you are sure it's the video that needs adjustment, you can nest the sequence and treat it as a clip, see info here: How to Nest Sequences in Adobe Premiere Pro | eHow.com / Battle Vaughan

I'm sure my monitor is fine that would be too easy! I wish...

How does nesting help the situation?

Am clueless on that.

Thank you.

As Battle said, when you nest a sequence into another, Premiere treats the nested material in the new sequence as a single clip. It's then an easy matter to drag the Effect to the new clip and adjust it any way you like. The simplest but least accurate way to do what you want is just drag Auto Levels from the Adjust Effects menu to the clip. It's a bit of a sledgehammer but it works. It will go insane, however, if you have any dissolves or fades in your material.

I do all of my color correcting, light & dark, etc. via my Matrox Axio card. If you are using PP without a Matrox card, you're missing out. However, if you do have Matrox hardware, then it has a host of color correction tools to deal with.

I agree.

You miss all the hangs, BSOD's, OOS, and a whole lot of other mysterious errors that seem to be the major benefit of Matrox equipped systems, apart from the fact that it may, just may, run only run on outdated systems but not on normal modern day systems.

Please remember that the Matrox cards were designed as a door stopper and in that role they do a perfect job. Use them for anything else and you are in for a big disappointment. Their engineering team was only focused on the door stopper function, nothing else.

As to color correction, PR has that in abundance.

Yes, the "Sledgehammer" option is out because I have both dissolves and fades.

Normally I edit my own footage which doesn't have this problem. This challenge is a direct result from the handiwork of others efforts.

So, before now I've never had to use effects before. Applying them to a clip is a totally foreign.

Being a visually oriented person, is there some video/tutorial on the net that would clearly demonstrate the whole process from start to finish, or alternatively, some step by step guide which would accomplish the same purpose?

There's always time to get one feet wet in order to get the job done!

Tks for all of your pitching in and contributing.

Premiere's online help is actually pretty good and links to tutorials in many cases. Also, Lynda.com and Videocopilot have some great tutorials.

The Sledgehammer is only when using Premiere's Color Correction tools in Auto mode. Applying them manually is easy and they won't be confused by transitions. The tools within Premiere are likely all you'll ever need.

You may find it useful to use the waveform monitors available in the Program Monitor window. Click on the three overlapping circles icon to get the menu. If you have experience with the technical side of television production you will find a number of familiar waveform displays.

If you have no experience with waveform monitors you might try looking at the 'RGB Parade' that shows the levels of the red, green and blue color channels. The top of scale, 100, represents maximum white while 0 at the bottom represents black. Each column of red, green and blue shows the signal values from the left to right side of the screen. A normal video image will have a distribution of values from below 10 to above 90 but only a few points should actually touch the 0 or 100 line. A very bright white should be close to the 100 point but if it actually lies on the 100 line then it has been clipped. (If you are a photographer and use Photoshop or something similar then '100' equals '255'.) The longer the horizontal line at the 100 point, the larger the area that has been clipped. A similar situation applies at the bottom of the scale where dark values are clipped to black.

You have described the picture as being too bright which can occur for many reasons. If the picture is bright and lacks contrast then the black level needs to be adjusted. The RGB parade will not have values close to 0 in any of the channels. Select Video Effects>Color Correction>Brightness and Contrast and use Brightness to bring the overall signal closer to the 0 level and use Contrast to restore the white values toward 100. The two controls interact so you will have to work with both of them.

Another possible reason for the picture looking too bright is too much contrast with the white values pushed toward the 100 line. Use the Contrast control to reduce contrast and use the Brightness control to keep the blacks toward the 0 end of the scale. If the excessive brightness was caused by applying too much contrast then you may also find that whites have been clipped. Changing the contrast will reduce the brightness but details lost in the white clip will not be restored, the clipped areas will just become light greys.

If the image has good whites and blacks, but the middle tones in the image are too bright, then try using Video Effects>Image Control>Gamma Correction which changes the distribution of values without much change to the high whites and low blacks.

None of the fixes come for free in a technical sense. You may have more noise in the image or see banding. Good luck fixing the clips.