How to Make Your Youtube Videos Lighter

As in less dark.

The pocho-pocho/line-dancing routines that Syirah recorded were quite shadowy. When I put one up on Youtube to share, it turned out even worse. I couldn't make out whether it was me or my twin sister rocking there.

I scoured the Net to look for something to help improve the "lighting" situation.

And found a tool called Virtualdub.

It is a freeware created by a student who had some free time presumably. He wrote:
"I  basically started VirtualDub in college to do some quick capture-and-encoding that I wanted done; from there it's basically grown into a more general utility that can trim and clean up video before exporting to tape or processing with another program.  I released it on the web and others found it useful, so I've been tinkering around with its code ever since.  If you have the time, please download and enjoy."

So I downloaded it, read the guide and then tried it.

It came packed in WinRAR and I clicked on the .exe file to run the application.

Then clicked File, Open Video File and selected the video I wanted.

It opened in two panes which will show the "before" and "after" effects.

Then I chose Video, Filters, Add, Levels

Then I clicked Show Preview to show the results of my adjustments of the filter

I moved the centre triangular thingamajig to get the brightness that I liked and played with the slider on the preview pane to check how it turned out on the other frames.

Clicked OK, OK. The "before" and "after" effects:

Not bad. Now I can see myself!   *smiles*
Saved as AVI.


Done. I repeated the process for the other two routines, and then plonked them into Windows Movie Maker to make up the sequences and put in the effects and so on. Uploaded to Youtube, and finally put in the captions and sub-titles.

Lot of technical work involved just to share a 4 minute video of my pocho-pocho class - and I now appreciate what my daughter Muni and those in her profession go through everyday and night.

Should I do this again for my gym workouts?

Hahahaha ..... I can hear the groans........