Increase brightness of video with minimal noise

I recently came upon a video that was way, way too dark. Unfortunately Handbrake does not have any brightness/contrast/gamma corrections. So I played the video in VLC and used the Extended Controls to increase the gamma slightly. As far as I can tell, the slider is from 0 - 10 with 1.0 being the default.

So my solution is to transcode the video with VLC at a high bitrate (the source video bitrate was about 22Mbps I believe) at about 15Mbps, mux the audio back in, and then re-encode with Handbrake with my preset.

This is the command line I used with VLC:
/Applications/Video/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC Source.m4v --intf=rc --sout="#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=15000,gamma=1.3}:standard{mux=mp4,dst=Dest.mp4,access=file}"


Edit: In the end I found that this wouldn't really work too well, so I used avidemux2 with a gamma filter, encoded at the highest possible bitrate, then used Subler to remux the audio and chapter tracks, then ran it through handbrake for my HD settings.

Comments

  1. The Old ManNovember 12, 2017 at 1:16 PM

    It is very irritating that 1) so many movies and TV shows today are so gol durn DARK. Some sequences are barely visible in a darkened theater. SHAME! and 2) Handbrake and other encoders don't have controls to make these sequences brighter/visible. Nearly the entirety of Game of Thrones and the "raid" sequence in Zero Dark Thirty are perfect examples.

    I use an excellent paid application from Wondershare calle "Filmora" which does have a brightness slider, but it is not adequate in many cases.

    ReplyDelete

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