Pls. Help: Blown out Whites

[Roman Shafro]

I'm frantically trying to finish 2 movies for my wife's 50th birthday this Friday and my son's wedding on Sunday. Both movies have a lot of mixed clips: some are VHS recaptured to DVDs(MPEG2) on a DVD recorder, some are DV, and the rest is JPEG photos. I used 'broadcast colors' filter for all clips, and 'reduce flicker' switch for photos. Projects were rendered to NTSC DV in Vegas 6, compressed with Canopus ProCoder, and then written to DVDs in DVD Architect 3.

Both movies play well on a digital HD TV set. However, while watching on an analog TV or analog projector, I see a lot of blown out whites in former VHS footage & some photos. All clips captured from DV tape look OK.

I'm almost out of time, does anyone have a quick fix? TIA - Roman.

[Steven Davis]

Blown out whites would probably need to be addressed in the individual clips. Depending on the foreground, you could adjust the clips with curves or levels filter.

But if you have a mixture and only, let's say 12 of the clips are blown out, you'll probably need to address those prior to final render.

[Roman Shafro]

Originally Posted by Steven Davis

Blown out whites would probably need to be addressed in the individual clips. Depending on the foreground, you could adjust the clips with curves or levels filter.

But if you have a mixture and only, let's say 12 of the clips are blown out, you'll probably need to address those prior to final render.

Thanks, I was hoping that broadcast colors applied to the whole project would do the trick, but obviously I was wrong... Unfortunately, the TV I use for editing is also a digital one, and I don't get to see those problem areas until the finished project is played on an analog TV. Doing a histogram on complete footage will take forever.

[Mike Kujbida]

Roman, here's two suggestions.

First of all, check out the Are You Exposed? tutorial from Douglas Spotted Eagle for some workarounds.

Next, I wouldn't use the Broadcast Colors filter. Instead, apply the Secondary Color Corrector FX only on the offending clips & images. Then select the Computer RGB to Studio RGB preset. This brings the levels down from the full range of 0-255 to the DV range of 16-235 and should help things a lot.

edit: Here's two more tutorials for future reference.
On the Level (in 2 parts);
Exposing for DV

p.s. try to remember to relax and have some fun on your very busy and hectic weekend :-)

[Roman Shafro]

Originally Posted by Mike Kujbida

Roman, here's two suggestions.

p.s. try to remember to relax and have some fun on your very busy and hectic weekend :-)

Wonderful, thank you so much for helping! I think I was confusing Secondary Color Corrector with Broadcast Colors all along...

p.p.s. I changed one 15min movie by using filters for individual clips, and Vegas froze on me after 45min of rendering. I then took my 2nd 15min movie and applied filters to the output. This saved a lot of time, both editing and rendering. All of my non-DV footage (90-95% of total) need it anyway, and the DV portion didn't seem too washed-out at the end. I used a secondary color corrector with PC RGB->Studio RGB preset, followed by Color Curves just crushing the whites slightly. I'm amazed by the amount of detail that became visible in those 15-year-old VHS clips. I have no idea how I managed to ignore the whole subject of exposure & color correction for so long. Thanks for your help, Mike!