Tom Schlodder

I'm finding myself somewhat baffled by the simplicity of the vectorscope as well :) Well actually, it's with the YC Waveform chart. I understand what I'm looking at, but translating that into actually tweaking the picture is a different story. Is there a common method to bringing the levels down to 100 IRE (or just below that point)?? For example: start by adjusting highlights, then midtones? Turning on the video limiter clips the levels off at 100 but the resulting image is looks awful (which is no surprise.) Is there a rule of thumb as to when use the video limiter (such as: when the levels only need to be droped or raised by 5 IRE?) I realize how incredibly simple-minded these questions must sound and I apologize for hurting your eyes and brain with them :) Assume I know nothing and start explaining from there (I would think that there are many others like me out there that would appreciate a definative explaination) or refer me to a book you might know of. Thank you very much in advance for the assistance.

Here's the scenario: We're a small start-up video production company that is experimenting with the idea of Real Estate Walk-Thru videos. The key to these are that we keep the costs next to nothing so that the price will reflect this. I can only imagine that this has been asked before but since I couldn't find it while searching the forums, I'll just post it here. Shooting on mini-DV inside a house, the large windows are making me pull my hair out. Of course, the area around the window exposes with a blue tone while the rest of the room keeps that orange tint from the tungsten light bulbs throughout the house. White balancing to either the window lighting or the room lighting doesn't really produce favourable results. And then there's the issue of overexposure that I'm not having any luck curbing as well. I don't really have the option of covering all the windows in CTO or diffusion of some sort but am starting to think that there really isn't any other solution. If there is a work-around that someone can suggest, I would LOVE to hear about it at this point. Thanks in advance.