Diffusing daylight.
 

Hi there,

just a quick query. I shot a 'night' scene recently at a house party, but because of availablity of extras, we werent able to shoot it at night and instead had to shoot it in the day. Only thing is, it was imperative to plot that the party be at night. Worst thing was, when we got to the location - there were no curtains!!! So with very little time, we just had to improvise them - using black bins bags and velvet etc stuck over windows. However, light has leaked through, from under doors and from some windows not properly covered. Is there ANYWAY in post to rectify this? Prefferably on FCP, but if not is there any program (maybe after effects?) that has the capability of diffusing this daylight? Its not very harsh, and isnt clear when the camera isnt directly pointed at it. Anyway whatsoever?

thankyou thankyou! Any help will be greatly appreciated. cheers, jack :)

Are the shots locked down or moving? If they are locked down you might be able to garbage matte them and feather the edge just to make them a bit darker. (or duplicate the clip, dial down the brightness, and then slip it under the garbage matted version so that this darker version of the clip shows through , but just on the portion of the shot that has sunlight). Without seeing the clip it's pretty tough to advise, but you could crank down the white level with the 3way color corr... There may be a way to fix it, but there is no filter that is just going to suck the sunlight out (at least not in FCP).