^{Compensating for flaws in video}

This topic describes some common flaws in video and provides tips for dealing with them.

• Over saturation. Occurs when colors in a video bleed outside the edges of objects or smear when an object moves. You can often fix over saturation before capturing video by adjusting your capture card's saturation setting to a lower level. Saturation is the amount of color in the image. Too little saturation produces images that can appear black and white. Too much saturation produces colors that appear artificially bright.
• Too bright or too dark. If a picture is extremely bright or dark, the recording may be beyond repair. You can recover a picture by adjusting:
  • Brightness, to raise or lower the video level.
  • Contrast, to optimize the number of shades of gray or levels of luminance, also known as the grayscale.

By raising the video brightness setting and optimizing the grayscale, you can correct a dark picture. However, in doing so, you increase video noise because noise is most noticeable in dark areas of an image. It is possible to partially hide the noise by increasing the contrast.

These different adjustments can be made when you are capturing video in Windows Movie Maker using the Video Capture Wizard. For more information about configuring video capture devices, see Understanding the Configure Video Capture Device dialog box.

Related topics

• Preparing to create your video