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Automatic brightness correction with MSU SmartBrighness
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If your video is too dark or has other brightness issues, you can fix it in
Video Enhancer using one of
color correction filters. Some of them
require manual selection of many different settings, but some are automatic and do their best without asking
questions. One of the best such filters is "MSU SmartBrightness" by MSU Graphics & Media Lab.
It can automatically correct brightness and contrast levels in video.
Usually, the default settings work great on videos which are dark or oversaturated.
This filter supports scene change detection which is useful since the video may have different levels of brightness from scene to scene.
This tutorial will show how to install and use this filter with Video Enhancer.
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Adding filter to Video Enhancer
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Filters are distributed separately from Video Enhancer as .vdf files. The ones placed to plugins subfolder
of Video Enhancer folder (and also VirtualDub folder) are detected automatically. If you place filters to a different
folder you'll need to show it to Video Enhancer once, it will remember the location for future launches.
Video Enhancer must be in advanced mode in order to be able to use VirtualDub filters.
Click on the "VD Filter..." button to add filters to Video Enhancer.
MSU SmartBrightness can be downloaded directly from their website.
After downloading, simply unzip the "MSU_SmartBrightness.vdf" file to somewhere on your harddrive.
Click on the "Add..." button to add additional filters to VideoEnhancer.
Browse to the folder where the "MSU_SmartBrightness.vdf" filter is located.
Click on the .vdf file to add the individual filter to VideoEnhancer.
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Open video file in Video Enhancer
To open the video which needs to be processed, click on the "Browse" button at the top.
Locate your video file. If you place your mouse cursor over a video, you will see some information about it.
After opening the video, you will see a preview of it to the right.
Click the "Choose..." button to select and configure the output video and audio codecs.
You should choose a codec for video. In this case a lossless codec was used but you don't have to do the same.
See Video Enhancer manual section to learn what codecs to use.
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Using filters in Video Enhancer
Click on the "VD Filter..." button to add filters to your video.
Choose "MSU SmartBrightness" from the filter list.
You will be presented with this configuration dialog.
- Brightness & contrast settings:
You can choose between different presets.
Recommended setting "Auto (1): correcting manual settings"
This default setting works great on most dark videos.
- Contrast:
Contrast adjustment. Setting of 1.00 means keeping original contrast.
- Brightness:
Brightness adjustment. Setting of 0 means keeping original brightness.
- Color correction:
Colour adjustment. Setting of 0.00 means keeping original colour.
- Advanced settings:
Different brightness configurations can be selected here.
The default setting should be good for most videos.
- Scene change detection
Recalculate brighness levels when new scene has been detected.
Recommended to enable this setting since brighness levels usually is different from scene to scene.
Filters which will be applied to the video will be listed under "Filters sequence".
You can add more filters to the list. Pay attention to the order of filters in this list, because this is the order
in which the filters will be applied to the video.
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Example
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Here's a frame from a sample video:
And here it is processed with MSU SmartBrightness (default settings, color correction: 1.00) in Video Enhancer:
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