Highlight Healing test, CyberLink PowerDirector13

CyberLink PowerDirector13 test of Highlight Healing, Video Enhancement and Exposure. Only the Exposure settings appear to have affected the final video.

I'm evaluating PowerDirector13 as I continue to improve my video editing skills.

I'm working on a 2 camera recording of a student play, and one of the recordings has poor contrast. The highlights are washed out, and unfortunately that includes the faces of the main actors.

Under Color Adjustments I can make slight improvements by lowering Exposure and increasing Shadow slightly. (I'm not expecting a fantastic result because the raw footage simply is what it is, but I was hoping for a little better.)

It seems like Highlight Healing would be just the thing, but I can't see that it makes any difference whatsoever. I also have yet to find an explanation online of what it's actually supposed to do.

I made a test video using Keyframes with the settings listed below. I threw in some Video Enhnacement settings out of curiosity. I also tweaked the Exposure settings, lowering exposure from 100 to 0 in increments of 20.

To my surprise, only the Exposure adjustments made any change I can detect with my eye.

For discussion, see the CyberLink forums.
http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/post...

For the test, Keyframes were placed roughly every 5 seconds with the following settings:

05 sec: Highlight Healing: 50
10 sec: Highlight Healing: 100
15 sec: Highlight Healing: 0
20 sec: Video Enhancement Degree: 50
25 sec: Video Enhancement Degree: 0
30 sec: Video Enhancement Degree: 50
35 sec: Video Enhancement Degree: 100
40 sec: Video Enhancement Degree: 50
45 sec: Exposure: 80
50 sec: Exposure: 60
55 sec: Exposure: 40
60 sec: Exposure: 20
65 sec: Exposure: 0
70 sec: Exposure: 100

Metadata: The original video is 1920x1080p shot with a Sony HDR-PJ790. Before applying keynotes I croped the video to roughly half that length and width, which is why it's a little grainy. I went ahead and rendered the video at 1080p anyway, though 720p would have been more than adequate.