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Video Editing – Some rights reserved by MACSD
My mother taught me that you use salt during cooking, not after. Seasoning food after it’s come off the stove is an attempt to correct something that wasn’t created correctly. A dash of a few table condiments can often make a bad something better or palatable. In the same way that you can’t uncook something and then take a second swing at your dish unless you have access to a time machine or Harry Potter’s magic wand, you certanly can’t unshoot a badly lit video.
Can you fix bad lighting later?
The long answer is: after realizing that the amount of lighting captured in your footage is somewhere outside of your personal or professional tolerance levels and you’ve reflexively slapped yourself in the forehead, you have three options. I have to warn you though, two of them are less than awesome.
Option 1: Reshoot it.
Just like last time, only better. Bet you didn’t budget your time and resources for this, huh? Should anyone ask why they’re shooting the same thing over again, you can always just lie and say your dog at the hard drive with the original footage. Oh, if your badly lit video footage happens to be of a special event like a wedding or a child’s recital, have fun trying to convince everybody to come back and do it again.
Option 2: Tweak it.
All those sliders and plug-ins in your editing software have to be able to fix it, right. Isn’t there an app for that? Well, I’m sad to say that though we have had the technology to put a man on the moon for several decades, science has figured out a way to make your badly-lit video not stink. We can, however, make it stink less.
For example, let’s say your talking-head interview footage comes back and the subject’s face is darker than the background. Big no-no. Potential dealbreaker. The viewer isn’t going to accept this unless you’re able to convince them your subject is in the witness protection program. To tweak it, you’ll be force to have to do something like matte out your subject’s head, then treat the shot in two separate layers so you can increase the brightness of just the subject and lower it for the background. I’m warning you, it probably won’t be perfection. In fact, don’t be too surprised if the results leave you feeling like you just missed a putt.
If that terribly imperfect solution doesn’t work out, you always have Option 3: Toss it.
Okay, I said two of the three options were less than awesome. You may think all of them weren’t so hot. I disagree. Yes, it would really just be an incredibly big bummer, to say the least, to have to throw out all that work if you couldn’t reshoot it or tweak it, but consider it a huge lesson learned about the value of proper lighting. You just had to do learn it the hard way as opposed to just reading this blog. Funny how that works, right?
There are few things aside from plague and locusts that will cost you lots of time, and possibly money, during the editing and post-production process than trying to rescue badly lit footage. You can’t unbake that cake once it’s out of the oven and though you can often mask some imperfections with enough frosting, nothing beats doing it right the first time.
To learn more about lighting your online video shoots (plus any other tips you might need!), please visit the How To section on Watch.tv.
Do you have any tips for lighting your online video? Send us a tweet or comment here, on our Facebook page or YouTube channel.
