Canon Red Channel Blow-Out

Over the last year, I've had a number of cases where I end up blowing the red channel and completely messing up images, when otherwise everything looks fine. I have even had cases when shooting individual pictures of teams, that one player ends up blowing the red, while the others don't. In this case, I was shooting manual, under unchanging conditions, and it must have been the 580EX fill flash that did the channel blowing. Short of looking at the histogram after every shot, is there anyway to build in a safeguard against red channel blowing? I use the flashing blown highlights now, but there have been times when the red blows, and the overall luminosity is not showing it as being blown. Any tips on how to combat this. I am using 1DMk2Ns by the way.

Is that flash unit emitting some sort of infrared light during the shot? (af assist or whatever)
I was happy to see how well my 20D controls the red channel over the XT I previously owned. The reason must be simple. The 20D has a much stronger and steeper IR cutoff filter built in, than the XT. Yet, if a red subject is illuminated from an IR source, that could add to the red channel (false color), hence the clipping.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of a built in safeguard, short of under-exposing, and that's worse, in my opinion, than blowing out the red channel. However, on the 1DMKIIN, if I remember correctly, you can look at an RGB histogram instead of the luminosity histogram and if you check that you could certainly double check yourself as you shot.

Mark

The RGB histogram will definitely be something we start using... but that can't be set to flash up after every shot, I don't believe. I think that you can do this with Nikon, but I've not tried it. With high volume shooting, this could really slow things down, but may be the only way to be safe.

I am also thinking about using manual fill flash, but that can be problematic also since it requires all my photogs to be more skilled than they need to be now.

It can on a 1DMk2. Check the manual, it should be possible; set histogram to RGB and review to 'on with info'.
The blinking highlights will not blink if only 1 channel is blown AFAIK
More info on 'the Red Problem'

OK, I feel pretty stupid now.. I have owned for 1 Series bodies and never noticed the "On with Info" option.