Over exposed background footage...can I fix it?

I don't think you can do anything to really help that. The shirts and sky are blown out to the point where it's just a white wash. You could help it a little with 3-way color corrector, but the data in the white wash is gone. Try the 3-way CC and see what you can do. If it helps the background, then apply some limiting to the correction to keep the guy in the foreground exposed.

tim

As far as I can tell there's not much you can do. Your screen consists as a whole entity. Change one aspect and you change them all. The only way you're going to improve the image is to seperate the foreground from the background and work from there.

You might try layering and experimenting with masks. It's not gonna be great. Plus my experience with overblown whites is that they never get much better even with correction.

Watch DV record. It tends to be hot if your are used to shooting analogue. I set my camera zebra at 90% for that reason.

However, your subject's face is properly exposed. Many times unless you manipulate lighting during the shoot, you'll have exposure problems like this. Plus you have African-American folks wearing white. That's a bear. Anytime someone with a dark complexion wears white, you'll fight the choice between properly exposing their facial features while trying to avoid glowing clothing.

I used to work with an African American news anchor who insisted on wearing white because she said that she looked good in white. Well she did, but the human eye is much more complex than the camera eye. The camera hates those huge contrasts.

Try the 3 way color corrector and try to bring down the whites, but you're not going to get much improvement. Sorry.

Of course, I know enough to be dangerous so someone out there may have another idea.

oof, vignette, a tight one.

i was just playing with this. nothing. unless you do some really creative masking and key in some textures, you're stuck with this. you could rotoscope him out and place him on a different background, how much time ya got?

next time you'll pay attention to your backgrounds. this is why if i gotta do an on-field interview of any sort, i demand my camera operators take out 2 to 3k of lights and i get the backgrounds i want because i don't shade the cameras until i'm pleased and then producers get angry and cam ops don't like angry producers.

read this:
Too Darn Hot : Fixing exposure problems in FCP