Does anyone know how to stop this from happening? Can you brighten the video up at all with a program? I am encoding from a 15 gig raw avi to a mpeg2. On some shots it is really dark i.e. night shots or dusk. Is there any way around this?
VirtualDub has brightness filters and works with .avi. It's freeware and 3rd party programmers contribute filters and modifications to it(VirtualDubMod etc..) Check it out.
The best vdub filter for dark video, is the "Levels" one. Enable the preview, and play with the sliders...you'll figure it out.
But after I encode it to mgeg2 format I can't use Vdub can I? The darkness/brightness turns out fine if I leave it at a 15 gig raw transfer. It's when I encode it to fit on a dvd is where I get the darkened video.
You already have a 15 gig raw avi (no compression), so open it in vdub, apply the filter, and save it again as another 15 gig raw avi. You would be better if you used virtualdub to frameserve it. Then you can filter as you like, without having to save an intermediate avi again.
