Brighting a clip

Hi gang

I'm having trouble working out how to brighten a picture, found lots of stuff on colour correction but I'm struggling with Brightness and contract.

asap help would be great

Many thanks

Neil

What kind of trouble? In the exposure board try raising the mids.

Where do I find the exposure board ?

Cheers

Neil

Color Board (Command 6). Click on then click on Exposure Button on the top right.

Many folks new to video make the mistake of bringing up the brightness of the entire clip. The result is the clip looks "washed out" (loss of contrast) and the brightest spots look "blown out" (loss of detail in the bright spots).

The simplest thing to do is bring up the mids (aka gamma). That doesn't affect the black/shadow or bright/highlights as much.

Just to be broad general since we don't know the details, typically one might bring the black down to the baseline (looking at the waveform). This improves contrast. One brings up the mids so the image appears brighter. Since that might also bring up the highlights which may be OK if they're dark too or it may be too much. Then you'd bring back down the highlights.

Basically you may have to go back and forth between blacks, mids, highlights since each can impact the other. That does give you a lot more control than just bringing up the brightness of the entire clip.

Before you get into the "color" part of color grading, knowing how to use the black, mid, highlights in the color board are a first step in learning how to control "contrast" and "exposure" in FCPX.

Sorry, I found the exposure board, I was being a little brain dead.

I was filming at night, Morris Men dancing in an orchard lit with lights on the side of the cider factory building.

I guess I need to be careful with the blacks, making sure there isn't lots of noise.

I'll check out your recommendations

Thanks

Neil

How about reading the manual. FCPX is no plug and play.

good point, I'm trolling through the tutorials at Lynda.com but some things are hard to find so I'm filling in some gaps.

Any help given is very much appreciated and hopefully l'll one day be able to give some constructive advice

Cheers

neil

macProVideo.com or Ripple Training will give you much better quality training, IMHO. See if this helps.
www.macprovideo.com/hub/final-cut/a-guid...nd-secondary-grading

Thanks, I'll check it out. I'm on a weeks free trial with Lynda.com so I can easily change. I am generally finding the tutorials useful though.

Neil