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Enhancing a video is very subjective and it's easy to get carried away. I would recommend
looking back at the original footage occasionally just to make sure you are actually improving
on it. BASIC INFORMATION ON EFFECTS
ADDING EFFECTS TO A CLIP Click on THIS icon for the video clip you
wish to edit. If the clip is too short for this icon to appear, zoom in to your project
with the scroll mouse until it appears... or just make the clip longer simply to click
on it. ADDING AND REMOVING EFFECTS
I will cover various different effects as this tutorial progresses. You double-click
on one to add it. Once you've chosen all of the ones you'd like, click OK and you go to
a more powerful editing screen. From here, you can choose to enable or disable individual
effects by ticking this box here, and you can remove them completely by clicking on
this 'remove' icon. ADJUSTING THE ORDER OF THE EFFECTS
You CAN alter the order of these FX and it does make a difference. For example, if you
had a dark clip you'd have brightness and contrast before the colour effects, as then
the brightness is corrected so that you only have to worry about adjusting the colours
with the colour FX. COLOUR CURVES
Double-click on Color Curves. This is my particular favourite, as it lets you adjust everything
that I will be covering in this video by simply adjusting a line, which seems to work for
me. Choose the colours you wish to adjust by choosing an option from the drop-down list
here. In short, along the bottom is the brightness of the colour before the change and up the
side is how bright it should look afterwards. It starts as a straight line, but as we all
know, curves are more exciting. Best of all, it has a load of presets for you to choose
from, and it's easy to restore to default if all goes terribly, terribly wrong.
BRIGHTNESS AND CONTRAST If you dislike colour curves, you can reach
the same result by using brightness and contrast, and colour correction, covered later.
Double-click on Brightness and Contrast. As you can probably tell, I chose this clip
because it's the worst case scenario. It's horribly dark, and even though we can lighten
it up there will be telltale artifacts, such as grain and slightly off-looking colours.
Still, we can at least improve it. I find that with dark clips, by moving the
contrast center to the bottom and by increasing the contrast, you get a wider range of colours.
This is one of those topics that really depends on your video footage, it doesn't take long
to adjust the sliders and to see what works for you.
COLOUR CORRECTION Double-click on 'Color Balance'. Vegas has
a lot of options for correcting colours. In short, it lets you adjust the feel of your
clips. You can up the blue and green for a cold, matrix look, or increase the red to
make the clip feel warmer. Alternatively you can go mad and make it look like instagram...
but no, try to resist doing that! You can alter the colours for shadows, mid-tones and
highlights, and if you're feeling particularly experimental, try the Color Corrector tools
for even more control. Trial and error is a powerful tool.
If you are in any doubt as to whether you've improved it, click on this tab at the top
to toggle the effect on and off. In this case, you can see that it was better before.
So here we are again, with the original clip on one side and the 'improved' one on the
other. Think of the possibilities!