help with whites. Please?

[Michael Armstrong]

Hi,

 

I'm trying to edit a music video. It was shot HD on the Panasonic HVX.

The footage I received had superwhite on it. I've corrected it to get the whites broadcast safe, but now the directors have decided they want to get rid of the white burn on the side of a person's face. I can't figure out what to do, so I was hoping someone could help me.

 

i've uploaded a screen capture to show you what I mean.

 

Mike

[Noam Gagliardi Rabinovich]

did you correct it using a filter or manually? I know that when you use the broadcast safe filter in final cut without fixing the whites/mids/black manually first, it squishes all the superwhites down, creating that burn.

[Michael Armstrong]

everything was fixed manually.

The DP over-exposed her heavily (as you can see).

It was originally done on purpose, or so i've been told, but they want to lessen it.

I've got some filters now that are supposed to do it.

 

Any advice is still welcome.

 

mike

[Jonathan Bowerbank]

The DP over-exposed her heavily (as you can see).

It was originally done on purpose, or so i've been told, but they want to lessen it.

 

You're out of luck, basically.

 

The DP obviously didn't understand the dangers of overexposure in HD video. Once you overexpose and those whites clip, you've lost all kind of detail and information and there's no way of pulling it back.

 

I always play it safe by underexposing the entire frame just a little bit, that way I have more information to pull from to customize my images in post. It's usually interesting visually to have some portion of the frame overexposed or blown out, but when working with actors' faces, it's good to play it a little safe.

[Peter Hoare]

I usualy try to dampen down this effect by applying the three way colour corrector and dragging the white levels down.... A lot of the detail would have been lost in the shoot so it wont ever look perfect but its the best way to do it that I have found....