I already know the answer, but the trouble is so troubling I will ask anyway!!!

So....just got back from a very long and tiring 4 day shoot in San Antonio Texas. (We live in Boston) We used an Archer Steadicam and Sony F800 shooting 4:2:2 50 Mb/s. The shooter in passing mentioned to me something about liking a star effect, but I didn't really see it on the Steadicam monitor, or in the finder. BUT....when I got back to Boston and began offloading our 200 gigs of video....UGH.....MASSIVE STAR FILTER ON NEARLY EVERY HIGHLIGHT!!! As I said, I already know the answer, but does anybody have any suggestions on ways to at least "mask" some of the effect. ug.