One uncontrolled variable is the fabric the talent chooses to wear to work.
Synthetic brighteners (such as are presumably in the white dress) do their job by fluorescing, and reflected off normal stage/studio lighting can really excite your camera's sensors. Unfortunately, normal UV filters cannot remove this.

I agree, though, that the levels in the bottom grab are still too hot.

My little girl did a short program for kids TV. Apart from the obvious request not to wear branded clothes or logos, they asked her not to wear white...... The woman on the news frame grab shows why.

I like taking photos of gardens on bright sunny days. White roses and petunias are a problem. I have no control over the lighting.

Another problem I have is with photos of my choir during performance, which has strong overhead lights. Most of the ladies have white hair and the men (myself included) have shiny domes. A graduated ND filter would probably help here.

My approach is to deliberately under-expose and tweak the highlights and restore exposure in Photoshop later on. Time constraints may rule that out for TV, however.

Limited dynamic range is a constant problem for me. I wish developers would spend less time on the high pixel race and more time on handling high dynamic range.

Compressing high dynamic range content to suit a low dynamic range display (TV screen, computer monitor, paper photograph) can be done but it is not easy. It is not simply a matter of blindly reducing contrast everywhere. The scene needs to be analyzed into important and unimportant components, and then each component re-exposed individually. Unimportant shadows should remain as shadows. Subtle shadows in the important components give depth to that component and need to be retained. The boundary between components must be feathered to minimize halos, and so on. But I am sure it could be done automatically with today's know-how

I was unaware of agents added to clothes to make them brighter. My wife probably is. Every time I post one of these, I learn more than anyone else.

Since I have little control over the lighting where I shoot most often, I constantly struggle to keep within the dynamic range of my camera... with varying degrees of success.

"

At least we don't have to worry about blooming reds any more -- the girls can wear just about any color as long as there is no chromakey in use.

I too wonder when I see live network broadcasts with bad levels. There's no excuse.

In local broadcasts here in the rural Midwest, I see one of the causes of inconsistency being the age demographics of the station staffs combined with little interest in learning new lighting and camera techniques. There are generally a few old hands who still subscribe to the rule "EVERY shot must contain components that hit pure black and pure white." And they are complemented by 20 year old shooters who have no idea what a waveform monitor or vectorscope is.