Red light ruining my shots...

Question

I filmed a band recently with a few Canon HX A1's. I asked the lighting guy at the show not to program any red into the show, but he ignored my request. Now in post, much to my dismay, all the "red" shots are awful. It looks like interlace combing but vertical. I've tried re-ingesting the footage but its still there. Any suggestions for cleaning this up? Its nearly impossible to cut around.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Vertical blooming. Bummer. The lighting designer owed you nothing without knowing what your technical limitations were.
There is not much you can do because the pixels you want don't exist and they've been replaced by pixels you don't want. FCP has 3-wayCC and it can be used to create interesting matte effects. You will be able to remove all the overexposed red pixels fairly easily and leave all red below a certain threshold. You might layer this over a copy of the clip that has had the red channel removed. There is aa similar process in image editors called overexposure recovery. It's based on the idea that most of the red pixels are blown out but there may still be some blue or green pixels in the same regions. You figure out a way to remove the offending red pixels and replace them with shifted and blurred copies of the blue and green channel information. The technique requires you understand how to key out the bad pixels, process the blue/green pixels, and shift the combined GB data to the red channel.
Since you've posted this in other forums, please go back to them all with a summary of of how you solved your problem even if it was to throw the whole thing away.
bogiesan