2019-03-25
Brightening shadows and darkening highlights
After having folded more than 10.000 origami cranes in less than 6 years, i'm currently processing 20.738 videos. I documented my trail of thousand origami cranes with different cameras and therefore resolutions. For example, my first GoPro was a Hero2 from 2012, and my latest is a Hero4 Silver from 2015, both used as third-person cameras. I also made recordings with Galaxy Nexus, PowerShot ELPH-150 IS, DSC-RX100 III and DSC-RX100 IV, to cover the first-person perspective. Because of the variety of sources, i decided to brighten the shadows and darken the highlights of some earlier footage from the GoPro, Samsung, and Canon. Their "dynamic range" is not as wide, compared to Sony and my current setup with center metering.
This is why some origami cranes don't look right in old recordings. White objects on black backgrounds are quite needy. It took me some time to find the balance, without to make it look like HDR gone wrong. And sometimes there is just too much contrast and not enough data to push it. The goal here is to make the difference less obvious. I developed tools based on Perl and PowerShell to automate this job. Relying on my filenames with dates and serial numbers, i wrote rules to let my script decide where to make certain adjustments to the videos. This will take some weeks of heavy processing with an Intel Core i7-8700. And no further human action is required to chew through 2,82 terabytes. Later, i will let my "video editing robot" have some fun too. I'm basically doing a complete remastering, since i already published almost each origami crane as a separate video in the past years, except for the latest 730 pieces from this year in Hong Kong.