Elliott James wrote:Here is a still (screenshot) of one scene in particular that suffers from the overexposure/glow (There are other scenes with the exact same problem) for reference. I can also link an unlisted brief clip from my Youtube channel if that helps.
I think pulling down the gamma will help add some contrast to the shot. I'd have to see a waveform to understand if the highlights are truly clipped and lost.
A couple of things I do if clients are forced to use clipped footage:
1) if just one color channel is clipped, you can sometimes "steal" detail information from one of the other channels using the RGB Mixer. [I believe Alexis Van Hurkman covers this in one of his books.]
2) if all three channels are clipped, you can try pulling a key on the highlights and blurring them slightly.
3) another recourse is to add a bit of highlight glow to the image just to take the curse off it. Basically, call it a "look."
4) sometimes ducking just the Highlight control in Primaries can create the illusion of more detail there. Ditto with Log Highlights. But this is a bit of a crutch.
5) if the entire sky is clipped, then I'd consider using VFX composites to drop in a new sky plate if it's workable (and there's sufficient time and money).
6) some camera formats (particularly Blackmagic's) have a "highlight recovery" mode that can help in some situations.
7) in some cases, your footage may be plagued with a Video/Full Data level issue and is clipping on ingest. If that's the case, try selecting the clip on the edit page, bring up the Clip Attributes menu and switch it the other way. If it's better, keep it. If it's worse, go back to where it was.
Worst-case scenarios to me are when skintones are clipped, and that's a total nightmare. Short of reshooting, there's no easy fix for that. You can force some kind of skintone-ish color in there with a tracking mask, but it's never going to look good. The picture you have is not that bad -- trust me, I've seen far worse material aired, particularly on American reality/documentary shows.