How Can I Easily Fix Bad Lighting?by Andrew AlexanderPublished on Dec 18, 2001 12:00 AM 
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Picture the situation; it’s the eighth day of Christmas, and your son or daughter is in the recital at school. You’ve brought your camcorder along to record this bit of history. The house lights go down and the stage lights go up, and you record the event. When you look at it later however, everyone looks like a ghost - a white blur on a black background! Can it be fixed?
The short answer is no. The long answer is, can they do the recital again?
The problem is that the majority of camcorders are designed for the average consumer, who uses it to record birthdays, family gatherings and picnics. The light levels on these situations are fairly average and the camcorder is programmed to respond appropriately. When you get to a stage production, or anything with a high contrast between light and dark, your camcorder doesn’t know how to handle it.
The video that was recorded without any regard to exposure settings is now cast in stone on your videotape; you can adjust the brightness and contrast in a video editing program, and that might help resolve some detail, but most often if the video is overexposed and your subjects look like ghosts, there’s very little you can do. It’s like asking someone to remove the flour from a pizza - it’s in there for good.
The best solution to this problem is to anticipate the problem of shooting high contrast video and know how to deal with it. Terry Williams has written an excellent piece on this site all about it, check it out.