John's recommendation is the first place I'd start. If that doesn't work you can "fake" some of the detail if there is any remote suggestion of detail left in theshot.
R U Exposed? might help you a little. I just noticed I need to get the background back to black, but it's readable, barely.

If the highlights are really washed out then you're in serious trouble, just lowering the level of the washed out parts will simply make them grey instead of white and probably make things look worse, we're kind of used to the idea of really over exposed bits having no detail but drop the level down and then the brain is really wondering what went wrong.
You might just get some improvement using a convolution kernal to fake detail, I tried this trick once and it did work, just that the amount of time it'd take keyframing everything on a not for money job removed any desire on my part to keep going.

Bob.

Douglas, could you do this old fart a favor?

I went your site to read the R U Exposed? article, but the very light gray text on the light gray background was nearly impossible for my worn out eyes to read.

Thanks for the article and your consideration!

Jay, it's calling the article from an old archive that I need to have our IT guy ferret out. I noticed this last night too, and can barely read it myself. Apologies, but we'll get it fixed, hopefully today.

Jay, the article is also on the DV Format site and it might be easier on your eyes.

Mike

Douglas, I don't care what Mannie says, you're a sweetheart!

Thanks, Mike!

If you ever run into an unreadable page like that, select the text using "select all." You can then read it.

Back to the original reason for the overexposure. You may have just simply screwed up and forgotten to do the following, in which case you already know this. However, I often have 1-2 unattended cameras for stage shoots and one thing that is virtually mandatory is to use the "spotlight" setting. This is a setting on Sony cameras, although others may have them, that will lower the exposure when the camera senses concentrated bright light in small sections of the frame. This is of course what you get with stage lighting, where the actors are lit very brightly, and the background is often totally black (especially with dance). To get perfect exposure, you have to manually expose. However, the spotlight feature will get you pretty close, and you certainly won't have totally unusable footage.

Now I want to go back and read these various articles recommended above. They sound very interesting.

John, I'm well aware of that "option", and that is no way to (to have to) read web sites.

It's fixed now, Jay.

Spot may have fixed the small size before I got there, because my eyes are horrible and it didn't seem that bad to me.

If the problem was small font size, sometimes you can also increase the size (doesn't work for all pages) by using the "View -> Text Size" feature in Internet Explorer.

No, the problem was (and this was due to the security we put in place last year when our domains were abused, some of our old content from days previous to the changes, the backgrounds that should have been invisible popped up. So, what you would have seen was slightly dark grey text over only slightly lighter grey background. Old eyes or not, very hard to read unless you were at a certain angle. Kinda like those trick photographs you had to stare at for a while in order to see the patterns they contained. It was terrible. I think we caught them all this morning, I sure hope so. With so many resources, it's tough to catch em' all, so it's always helpful when folks here notice a problem. Thanks to a suggestion from John Meyer, we were able to keep our security, and keep our pages in the same locations. No more jumping around in the background.