I spent most of today researching how to adjust various video settings with FFMPEG. Last night I shot video of a jazz singer in a fairly dark club. Even though I used a low-lux setting on the camera (Sony HDR-CX260) that compensated for some of the darkness, I was still left with video that seemed dark and low contrast.

One method suggested porting the entire video into JPG files, having a program-script adjust each of these, then reassembling them into a video. I tried this on a clip and it was pretty lousy quality, and of course had no audio.

I eventually delved into FFMPEG filters and found one that worked, though the documentation for it is sparse. The filter I used is “mp” for mplayer. A subfilter for mplayer called “eq2” does the magic. It can adjust several aspects of video at once. For details on what this filter…