Blast of white in background

[Richard Martz]

Well that is a problem. Obviously one of the things you should always do is to underexpose slightly and then color correct to bring out the elements that you desire. Once a scene has been overexposed there is little you can do to correct the sky except to partially replace it.

Here is an idea I’ve used before. Use a good luminance keyer and create a travelling matte for the sky background. Shoot a new scene of the sky. key in the new scene with transparency. Don’t do a full key or the scene will not look natural (as if there is anything natural about television). I’ve done this before and the result was pretty convincing – certainly better than an overexposed scene.

[Bouncing Account needs new email address]

Well, I have actually had pretty good luck making overexposed DV footage look much more “normal”.

(In analog, if you overexposed the shot, it was done-for.)

But with digital footage, I’ve actually found I can use the “3-Way Color Corrector” filter and just turn down the WHITE and MID level-sliders a bit and I can get the rolled-over whites to tame down substantially.
(Yes, there is even “detail” info in those rolled-over whites.)

So, by doing a combination of this 3WCC filter and maybe a bit of Richard’s “sky-replacement”, you can fix this footage.

[Winston A. cely]

I’ve used the above method with the 3WCC with over exposed fridge footage and it worked very well. In fact I use the 3WCC for most of my level correction instead of the Broadcast safe filter (which rarely works). And yes, there was some detail in the footage that didn’t appear until after corrected.