Video "enhancements" in Vegas 4.0.

By Alex Knappenberger

First off, this is just a little article about only a few of the things that you can do to make your video look better in Vegas 4.0 -- the best software ever made. :D  Everything here I discovered myself by just messing around with the software, and I'd expect other people to do so too, so I'm not going to go into exact full detail of where to put what and all of that, you have to judge for yourself.

Shoot your video well.        

I know everyone has probably heard this millions of times over and over, but I'll say it again, shoot your video well. If it's a short movie or whatever, make sure you have a good lighting setup, if it's kind of a documentary or whatever, make sure you have enough available light, cameras don't work magic. Always use manual focus, manual exposure, and all of that.

Lets get started.        

Alright, I'm going to use a DV framegrab from my $400 Panasonic DV52 camcorder for this "tutorial". This was taken with the camera vertically, and of course, it's dimensions have been reduced and it has been compressed for the web.

Untouched DV framegrab.

Color Curves.         

Color curves are probably the most useful tool in doing anything to your video. You can drastically change what the video looks like JUST with color curves.

I have, I'd say about 20 custom presets that I have made over the time and saved for color curves, all pretty much different, suited for different things. When I want to use color curves, I usually just go through all of my custom presets, and find one that fits, and then tweak it some more to fit the actual video. Basically you want to make a "S curve" and make the video have less red then blue or green. I once heard that "film doesn't do red well" so that's where I got that from, and it does seem to work.

Here's that DV framegrab with a couple different color curves applied, along with a screenshot of what the color curves look like.

Example 1.

Example 2.

Hopefully, you can see that there are endless things you can do with color curves, it's really up to you to make your own color curve presets and to tweak them, like I initially mentioned.

Lookin' good? I'm going to use the preset from the "Example 1" to continue on.

Gradient Map.         

I discovered this by total accident, and it can give a really cool look.

Here's a screenshot of what the preset looks like, so you can make your own and just use this as a judgment.

Example 3.

Now here's that same framegrab with BOTH the color curves (from example 1) and gradient map applied.

Example 4.

Your probably like "where did all my color saturation go?!?!", well the gradient map does do that, so that's what the next step is for -- putting the color back in with HSL Adjust. However, first I need to say that in example 4, it is NOT using the exact same color curves as I showed in example 1. I had to boost them up a little bit to make the image brighter, because once the gradient map was applied, it got pretty dark, so once again, you have to tweak these things for yourself and not just go by this guide. One cool thing you might notice about with the gradient map too, is it sort of brings out some natural grain...

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, sometimes, depending on the piece of video, the color curves and the gradient map don't go good together. So you either have to just use the color curves, or the gradient map. You can also dial down the "amount" in the gradient map preset, sometimes that helps.

HSL Adjust  -  Putting the color back in it.         

Alright, so now that the color curves and gradient map are applied, the color has been taken out by the gradient map, so that's where the HSL adjust comes in.

Example 5. The saturation has been bumped up.

Example 6.

All your doing is bumping up the saturation, and of course, you have to use your own judgment, on how much you should add. Actually, you can adjust the brightness here too with the luminance...

So far it looks pretty good (I'm not Canadian) eh? You have to remember, that there is no universal code/settings or whatever to magically make your video look better, so you HAVE to tweak everything here yourself.

Bump map  -  Final touches.         

The bump map is pretty cool, there's lots of things you can do with it. Here's 2 of them:

Example 7.

Example 8.

See how that gives a slight vignette look around the edges? It's pretty cool and useful, you just have to use your own judgment, like I've mentioned a million times. I am going to remove that one for this example though, I just did it so you know what you can do with it, it doesn't fit that picture too well.

Here's a real useful thing to do with the bump map, it can change a lot.

Example 9.

Example 10.

Crap, well I just realized that this isn't the best example, because the main framegrab that I'm doing all this stuff to was taken vertically, and I have to rotate the image in photoshop (because it's crooked in vegas, since it was taken vertically) and it doesn't make much sense with example 10. Anyways, notice how you can move the the thing around in the bump map? That should be to the left of the image, but since the brick wall was normally at the bottom of the picture in Vegas, it was like that. Blah blah...basically what it does with them settings is brighten up whatever area of the video that needs it. It's really useful in shots with the sky, you can place the bump map thing at the bottom of the image, and it kind of brightens it up, but it will usually give the sky a grey look, here's a better example.

Example 10. The one on the top is with the bump map.

Example 11. Notice how the adjustment corresponds with the images.

I left the example 10 images the way they were originally in Vegas (unrotated) just so you can get a better idea of how the bump map works with them settings. You can also notice by example 11, that I just did the color curves to example 10, because the gradient map just didn't look right, like I did mention, so you have to use your judgment. Of course, you can keyframe it to move along with your video...

The finished product.         

It does look better, however I wish I would of went easier on some things. Here's another example that I did with the same frame, and all of the same filters, but I tweaked the settings better:

One more cool "effect".         

There's this kind of diffusion thing you can do with Vegas also, it can be over used very easily, so use it sparingly, it gives a pretty cool "dreamy" look though.

Step 1 - Make a new video track.

Step 2 - Copy the original video clip, and paste it onto the new track above it, and make sure they are synced up.

Step 3 - Set the opacity level of the top track to about 50 or 60%, you can tweak this after your done.

Step 4 - Apply a Gaussian Blur to the bottom video clip layer, with about a 0.050 amount on both vertical and horizontal, of course you can adjust this to whatever, and make some cool effects.

That's it, you now have a diffusion shot, it doesn't look all that great on this example, but it can be pretty cool on some stuff.

If you have any questions (please don't ask me a bunch of retarded questions, but I will be happy to answer any legit question) E-Mail me at AlexK1100@hotmal.com or message me on AIM/AOL, my screen name is KillerSoundz.