Need help brightening up a clip

[Adub]

Okay, a friend of mine came forward asking for some help with brightening up this clip. I told him it's kind of impossible to get a "good" result due to the lack of video information as a result of the exposure.

But he looked at an example clip that I sent him where I messed with the levels using Smoothlevels a little bit, and said that the resulting video quality was acceptable.

So, I need some help from the community. Basically, what I want to due is brighten up the dark scene as much as possible while not completely blowing out the bright patches. I was thinking of doing some selective filtering on the dark scene using a combo of SmoothLevels and HDRAGC().

However, I'm short on time, and am not really experienced with these filters. If anyone has some ideas or scripts that they think may work, please, don't hesitate to post.

Sample clip (unprocessed, straight from the camera): http://www.mediafire.com/?jgycqldmjie

Thanks in advance!

[markanini]

IME smoothlevels and mctemporaldenoise will get you far.

[Adub]

Unfortunately, I'm going to need a little bit more help than that. I'm looking for some script arguments that really help to improve the clip as I stated above.

Ex: "Here's some settings that helped to brighten the clip: SmoothLevels(0,255, 1, 50, 230, etc...)" I unfortunately don't know all of the parameters that may help with this clip in smoothlevels, which is why I came asking here.

[LaTo]

Just a quick try:
Smoothlevels(0,1.2,255,32,235,Lmode=1,Ecenter=64,protect=16)

[Adub]

Ah, thanks LaTo! This is exactly the kind of script that I need! I'm on a linux machine right now, but when I can get access to a windows machine I'll take your script for a spin.