Wedding Footage from beach - fixing over-exposure and colour balance?

Question

Ok, so I just got married, and I had a friend video-tape the ceremony and reception for me.

The camera was a Sony PMW-EX3, and I've imported the footage into Final Cut Pro X.

The wedding was outdoors on a beach, and the footage appears quite burnt out. Also, the colours don't quite look right to me.

I'm used to shooting RAW for digital photos, and being able to adjust exposure and colour balance easily - however, I have no idea how to do the equivalent for video, so I'm sort of fumbling along.

The footage currently looks like this:

I had a look at this tutorial (

), and I've tried

So I dragged the exposure sliders around a bit, and I got this:

The exposure is still not create, and the colour balance is off though? Anyhow, I did choose to analyse colour balance when I imported the video, so I thought I'd click on "Balance: Analyzed" in the inspector. Then I end up with this:

The above seems quite over-saturated. I thought there might be some equivalent of clicking on a neutral gray for setting white balance, but I can't find it.

What steps would you guys recommend to fix this footage? I'm hoping something can be done...

Cheers, Victor

Answer 1

What you are trying to do is impossible given how bad the original footage is. I'm honestly pretty amazed at the result in the third shot given the original state. Unfortunately, video frames are the equivalent of a series of JPEG images. It is possible to shoot RAW video on ultra high end cameras, but the data rates are completely off the charts (around 90 to 100MB per second or worse). The information is simply gone and there is no way to recover it if it was clipped out.

It sucks, but that's the long and short of it. That's why I always do a pre-roll test prior to filming at weddings, but that's what experience of doing professional wedding videography for 3 to 4 years gets you.