I can't get outside daylight to be bright enough without lighting.

Correct brightness level for caucasian skin (zoom into the "lit" side of the subject's face) is about 75-85%, darker skin 60-75% depending on the particular shade of skin... 50% is a bit underexposed already. If your camera has zebras, learn to love them. Set them to 85%, expose your subject, then adjust everything else around that. Background too bright? Add light to your subject to bring them up into range with the background, then add light to the shadows to bring it up into registration.

Darkening stuff in post is free, lightening it brings out the grain more.

Okay thanks. What about the 'smokey effect'? If I brighten the video in After Effects, it is so bright that the room actually looks like it's filled with smoke. I don't want the whole scene to be like this, so can AE remove the smokey effect? I am going the instructions and features again, but it does not say much about removing it. It can remove grain though.

Brightness pulls the entire image up and down... what you should look at is using "gamma" instead which pulls the middle while leaving the top and bottom pinned where they were.

More specifically, if you use "curves", you'll have much more control over your image's various ranges of brightness.

Okay thanks. Well I went over all the footage and there are more problems with the continuity with the lighting then I thought. When I was shooting I should have used more lights maybe, but I was afraid the lights would show up in from all the various angle changes and camera pans. How do you filmmakers light an action scene consistantly, so you can shoot from multiple angles without the lights showing up in those angles? You would have to keep constantly moving the lights around, but doing that causes the lighting to not match continuously from shot to shot.

I wish my DP hadn't bailed on me just before shooting, otherwise he could have concentrated on that.

So I have two choices. I can bring down all the brightness in the bright shots, to match the dark shots. And also making the darker shots brighter, so you can tell what's happening. Then I can remove all the grain, and make it fit the other footage. Or I can rotoscope peaces out of the walls of the room, in the bright shots, and paste them over the dark shots of the walls, in the dark shots. Either way, I gotta get the lighting to match in all the shots. So what looks better? Should I have all dark walls, with the grain removed in half the shots, or should I have all brighter walls, that are photo-shopped from some of the scenes? I'm guessing the first option would require a lot less work?

we light a scene, then tweak for each angle. I recently had to change lighting distances and angle slightly for each angle in a dialog scene due to the fact that when we switched sides in the dialog, the Key became the interior backlight for the opposite shot, but the key needed to be higher than the backlight to make the lighting look more natural, so each change of angle gave a slight adjustment in lighting (in this case, 1 2K moved closer while the 1k opposing it moved farther, and vice versa for the opposing shot).

Knowing this comes with experience, but what I like to tell directors is to point to the monitor (if you don't have one, I recommend it) and literally tell me something looks wrong "there" - then I can discuss options, which are usually just doing what the director just told me to do "It's too bright there", "this is too blue"... at that point, it's just a matter of knowing which lights are lighting what part of the image, and having the tools to change it (dimmers, gels, old-school tricks such as bounce cards and the inverse-square law).

Sure. Thanks for the info.

Well the angles are not lit evenly and the lighting changes from shot to shot, more particularly it changes once the scene keeps switching to the opposite angle, and is much darker on one side. Maybe once those external monitors come down in price I can get one, or once I get more money. But for my current short, any advice on how to use After Effects to make the lighting all look the same? I thinking either photo-shopping peaces of the walls that are lit, onto the same pieces of wall, that are not near as lit in different shots.

Or I can just bring the bright walls down to match the shots where it's darker. What would look better and more professional? Or I could hire someone with more experience to make it look good after it's edited. Do editors do that, or would I be looking for someone with a different job title? If it's the editor they will just have to fix like 10 shots of an already edited film.

post screenies so we can tell you instead of guessing... it'll be much more focussed advice

Sure. I just got my new computer and will have to move everything on there first. Hopefully there won't be many more delays. I have to tell the actors if we need to reshoot or not, but it will be weeks at least before I can tell if After Effects is capable of fixing the footage otherwise. I guess I'll assume that AE can do the job, since people say it's nearly limitless in what it can do.