what to do? video is too bright...

[Longdaddy]

I have the camera mounted on the roll bar, the roll bar is pretty back into the interior of the car and large section of the view is taken by the inerior and the seat (I have full containment seat so it's big).

the video quality of the interor of the car is awesome. the view outside is terrible - blurry and extremely bright - even if there is no direct sunlight going into the car! I tried higher quality settings and they do not seem to make any difference. I did not find any other settings I could change.

I would like to keep the camera mounted to the roll bar - is there any way to adress the brightness issue? I am assuming this is the camera automatically compensating for the dark interior...

please help, this setup is pricey and I am getting video of a worse quality than people with $150 camcorders...

[BroussalM]

Hi Longdaddy,

Your problem is a common things for the cam with auto aperture (all of them!).
There is a too much inter/exter lighting difference.
If you have more than ~50% of your video inside the car, the cam "open" and make a good setup for the dark but the track is full bright. Reverse is the same, the track is good looking but inside it's the night !
There is no middle you must to make a choice and accepte a compromise.
To see very well what happen with the auto aperture of your cam, get it at home, connect it to your TV and move in the room with the cam, you'll see the limit between interior (walls) and exterior (windows) very well.

If you want to keep your cam on your roll bar, a solution is to change the lens. In standard the lense is 90°, if you get a 72° you'll make a "zoom" and get less interior and more track on the video. Then the cam will make a better aperture setup for the track.

You can also have a solution with a hard back-work of your videos with some soft as Première CS4 or Final cut Pro, but it's an other history... Anyway there is no miracle, in a very bright video the data are "burn" so you'll can't get back anything and for a dark one the result stay a bad video.

Changing the quality settings change the record quality ( fine/ super fine etc...) of the images coming from the cam. It doesn't change anything about the setup of the image. You can't change anything, it's full auto. It's only with the place of the cam that you'll make a difference.

Be sure that a cheap cam at the same place get the same or badder video. They have the same problem + the bad quality !

Make tests and get your owne solution.

Hope it's help you.
Regards
Michel

[Marcus]

With the cheaper fixed aperture/exposure cameras you will always get this. I found the best thing is to compromise and go for either an interior shot or an external.