I have been editing a wedding, where many if not most clips have seemed blown out. I noticed during editing as I dragged the edge of a clip to adjust length of a clip, in the preview window the clip seemed to not be blown out anymore, it seemed strange, but I kept on.

I finished the wedding after making hundreds of adjustments to lower the brightness of clips, not understanding how I could have shot things to be so blown out.

This morning I began making the highlight clip. I began copying and pasting clips from the original wedding video, to another new instance of Vegas, only to find in the new instance of Vegas that the clips were not blown out at all and in some cases were actually a tad too dark.

Somehow in my original project an effect or something must have been applied at the beginning of the process, but I cannot find it. What is going on?

I found the problem. I had apparently accidentally applied bright levels to the entire project at the beginning, thus blowing everything out.

I will now spend the rest of the day undoing this mess. I spend so many hours trying to fix footage that was perfectly fine. What a waste of time.

Actually, it's not so bad, because I did an great job shooting, the footage needs very little work. I simply removed the hundreds of applied effects by using Ultimate S "remove all effects" and am simply touching things up a bit here and there, etc., should be done in a hour at most.

i know human error all too well....

Been there been there been there.........one of those smack the forehead moments where you just want to go take a nap.

I too have been there and done that and man did I feel like a jerk BUT at least it got caught and fixed B4 rendering and or burning.
We all make mistakes. Well except me now since I have shot a job for going on 2 years!!! ;-)