I want to create some HDR PQ nighttime timelapse movies, and I want the stars to appear super-bright, like 1000 nits. The problem I'm having is isolating the stars in Final Cut Pro so that I can increase their brightness without increasing the brightness of anything else. I haven't found a good way to do this yet. All of my attempts at isolating just the stars results in the sky also being bumped up in brightness.

So, I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas how to solve this in FCPX. Obviously, just fiddling with the highlights slider doesn't work because it affects too wide of a range of brightnesses. I've tried making a luminosity mask, but I haven't been able to get it to isolate just the stars either. Curves also affects too much data. I don't know if there's a way to do it, but I think an HDR output movie would look pretty awesome if the stars were super-bright.

Any thoughts?

Moved to Video Post Processing board.