I recently completed a movie that has about three night scenes in it. When I view the scenes on my computer, the scences come out a little dark, but I can still everything that is going on. If I burn the movie to DVD and play it on my various tv's, then I can see the scences again (also dark, but I can still see them). But, when I played the DVD on one of my friends projection DVD players, then the scenes were entirely too dark and I can't see them. I really don't have the time to shoot the scenes over again, but i thought that as long as i was able to capture the scences onto my computer, then my monitor should display what i should see. I don't understand what the difference is between my tv and the projection.
1) would the same thing happen if I showed the DVD at a movie theater
2) is there anything that I can do in post production to make my night scenes brighter. I am using Magix and Premiere.

Hmm. No this probably wouldnt happen in a movie theater. Most home projectors aren't set up in proper lighting, which is key, and movie theaters would be dark enough to, well, you know what I'm saying.

As for the other thing. Editing can't shed light onto things that were not filmed originally. In other words, if your camera captured pure darkness, though you were dancing right in front of the camera, you can't magically make the scene light enough to see.

Though you can define what was captured better. Just play with auto color, auto contrast, and auto levels on premiere. It usually works for me.

Tyler

thanks for the post, but here is another question along those lines. when i was filming the night scenes (on a canon gl2), when i looked through the view finder, it seemed like it was enought light, and when i captured it into my computer, it also seemed that the scene was lit enough.
1) does the viewfinder on a mini dv cam not give a true image of the darkness
2)and what's an easy way to make sure you captured the right amount of darkness (what i mean by that is making sure that you don't overlight or underlight a scene) in post editing tools

If you watch behind the scenes stuff on movies, you'll see the way overlight stuff then darken it later. Better to get too much then too little as the saying goes.

You can always darken stuff during editing better then brightening it.

Computer screens are much darker than TV monitors. Your friend's projector might be calibrated wrong too.

I would recommend using levels and other effects in Premiere to push the brights up a bit though.

I wouldn't try to brighten up in post. It looks horrible. If you dont have time to reshoot then add a lot of sounds to the shot in post. Play with the audio a lot. This way even if they can only see a little bit of whats going on the sounds will give them enough that they wont be broken away from the story.

Q, I'm not sure how you brighten stuff in post, but it can be pushed the digital equivalent of at least a stop or two before it starts to look horrible. Don't use brightness and contrast. You need levels, curves, or a color corrector like FCP's which has control over darks, mids and lights separately. You want to push the lights in, raise the mids a tad, and crush the blacks if necessary to keep contrast.

Night shooting is hard! If you are using the same camera for most the shoots I would say do some test shots. Also shoot maybe two stops brighter and take it down later. I have an xl-1 and the view finder brightens the picture about 2 stops up so it got me the first time. Best way to mix it is having an external crt screen of some sort. LCD's seem to look darker, projectors even more. It is just the matter of getting comfortable with your gear.