Correcting video shot without ND filter

I need to try to correct some footage of a wedding that was taken in bright sun and no ND filter. Fortunately it is just a very short segment as the bride and groom exit the church albeit an important segment that I would like to get as good as possible.
Any suggestions to what I can do with vegas 11 to help.

If the whites are completely blown out, then there is no video data there to recover.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

Colour curves and fbmn software exposure will correct lightly blown out details, but not excessive blow outs. I do a lot of theatre work with spot lights and we sometimes have to expose the highlights at expense of the surrounding detail. ND filters are a must outdoors.

You could try and mask the camera operator's mistake by applying a Vegas soft contrast filter with a vignette and heavy tint (it is one of the standard presets) with a colour curve adjsutment, and make it appear to be an intentional effect.

My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10e (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

Thanks for the still. As illustrated with the histogram shown below, the initial data are actually quite burned and a good part of them stick to the maximum of 255, for which nothing but magic can be done :-)

So below is the original vs. what I get.

Frederic

Original:


FBmn Software Exposure GPU 3.0:


Histogram of the original picture:



Settings for FBmn Exposure GPU (needs to be version 3.0, the earlier ones do not have the Saturation control):



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FBmn Software: Professional GPU-powered plug-ins to fix White Balance and Exposure issues in a few clics.
Color-matching made easy with the ColorMatch plug-in.

Want to learn on Sony Vegas Event Pan/Crop tool? Watch my tutorial.
Or about Keyframes? Watch this one. French version here.