Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

That's a promising idea. I was wondering if there was a way of taking the bright clip and chopping out all information above 128 luma, taking the dark clip and chopping out all information above 128, and then simply adding them together.

Or maybe something slightly more sophisticated would be to do the above on the extremes (say, above 192 and below 64), and blending the center range.

Of course, there might be some strange effects I haven't considered. If there is a way of "chopping" above/below a certain luma with some small degree of fuzziness, that would probably reduce the possibility of artifacts.

I'm not positive but I believe this script is doing that. I create a mask of the brighter clip and then invert it so that only the darker areas get overlaid onto the darker clip. This leaves the bright areas of the dark clip untouched while passing the dark areas of the bright clip onto the corresponding areas of the dark clip. If i understand correctly grey pixels in a mask allow the pixels from the image to pass through with an opacity based on how close they are to white. This should mean that the middle ranges are a blend of both. I've been checking this method by using the gout and a bright version of the gout and i've not seen any artifacting spatially or temporally.