snicker said:

I've been working with individual colour channels to build up detail in each one. The red channel highlights clip a lot, the blue channel too but not quite so much and the green channel rarely clips. It's not often that you have clipping in all three channels simultaneously so there is usually good detail in at least one channel. The green channel is often useless because the white point is so much lower than the other channels but it can be used as a 'base' to restore some detail in combination with the blue channel which contains most of the highlight detail.

I've used 4 keys just in the red channel alone to build up the red highlight detail as well as using difference mattes to limit the areas which are being altered.

So basically I started with three precomps - one each for the red, green and blue channels, worked on building the detail in each using colour and luma keys, then used 'set channels' in a fourth precomp to set each of them as new R/G/B channels. This then becomes your new video layer.

Scanned through the thread and came across this. I've been thinking of using multiple separations for various reconstructions (the data is there, we just have to know where to look ... to paraphrase The X Files) and your idea here is brilliant. Two thumbs up!