What are some tricks used in post to improvise for low light footage? Editing the exposure and removing grain in after effects seems to help. Changing to black and white sometimes looks better any advice?
On top of what you are already doing, you can push your the pedestal and gain values in a Luma corrector.
What camcorder setup do you have now? I have the same issues. My camcorder is not good in low light so I am looking to invest in one that is.
I have the cannon g30 . The cam does well in low light its just every once in a while you get set up to close to turkeys and they come in a little before you need them to. A buck walks out right before dark you have light to see that its good footage it just doesnt look as good .
In your editing software you will have various color correction tools that are as basic as hue, saturation, contrast, brightness ... etc. I assume that you are using the Adobe suite since you mentioned AE. In AE or in Premiere Pro you can get into color correcting at a much deeper level and this can help you to a degree with low light footage. Correcting the Luma data can be powerful in any situation. There are many youtube tutorials on this. It will not totally fix low light footage and it won't fix noise or artifacts but it will help bring the levels into check for you and help. There are also 3rd party plug ins that you can purchase to help refine low light footage, but it will come at a price in terms of dollar bills. It can get pricey so you need to figure out what it is worth to you. But if you are using the Adobe suite you have some good tools already. You can push the video to a point but there still will only be so much that you can do. At some point you have to call it quits and live with some artifacts and noise. I had that issue on my Indiana turkey hunt last spring. The two toms flew down very early and wasted no time coming to the dekes. A lot of grain and noise and there was only so much I could do with it. Just had to live with what it was after I pushed the footage within reasonable amounts.
I may check into the plug ins as for the Dollars heck im into deep to pull out now lol. I have the adobe suite and your right it can make a difference. I was just curious if there was something out there some rule of thumb trick or process used. I guess just toying with after effects it is for now . Thanks for the input
