Noise reduction, such as Neat Video mentioned previously, will be necessary no matter what. Try some different tools within Vegas. The ones you mentioned are affecting the entire image and retaining a reasonably low level for darker parts of the picture will help keep the noise down.

Try Sony Fill Light first. It provides sort of a midrange "bump" in video levels and you can select the luminance range it will affect. For deeper control, try Color Curves and boost the high and midrange level and keep the low end where it is. Soft Contrast also gives a lot of control over the areas where contrast is increased. If you have NewBlue Colorfast, its a great tool also. Reducing saturation when you increase contrast will help because color noise is more objectionable than luminance noise. Colorfast will allow separate saturation controls for highs, mids and shadows.

But in the end, you will have to deal with noise reduction.

NewBlue Colorfast may be an option. A bit of a learning curve but there is a good Ian Stark tut on it and you get to hear his cool British accent to boot. As I recall the demo is full featured, no watermark.

Frederic Baumann White Balance does some amazing stuff too. Works well for land shots. FB also has a plug-in for exposure which may worth trying.

Regards,

Kimberly

[I]I can easily brighten the images in Vegas 11 using various Color Corrector gamma, gain and offset settings, and additional adjustments using the Brightness and Contrast controls.[/I]I would be careful about using any of the tools you mention, except for the gamma control. The other tools will almost certainly lead to clipping of the bright pixels. By far the best tool is the color curves tool: it is more complicated to use, but it lets you achieve far better results.

Everyone but me likes Neat Video for removing the grain and noise that always results from brightening underexposed footage. However, it does have the advantage of working within Vegas and not requiring a degree in geek to get reasonable results.



If you want to take a look at other noise reduction tools, you can read many old posts in this forum. Here are some links to posts I made a long time ago:
My Latest Denoising Tests (thanks Nick!)

How to Save/Improve Grainy Low-Light Footage?

Most of my work has been done with AVISynth. Some of these things can be translated to VirtualDub, although AVISynth allows more complex denoising and has better (and faster) plugins.

Put them above each other on two tracks in Vegas, match the project properties to the first clip, set the loop to play the events continuously, and then A/B between them.

In addition to my advice in these threads, you may find other people's advice helpful.

I have found that most of the native VirtualDub denoising filters tend to suffer from the same problems as Neat Video, a plugin that I've never liked, even though most people here in the forum like it a lot. IMHO most of these simple combo spatial/temporal filters tend to do too much damage to fine detail (that's the spatial part of the filter) and then leave too many artifacts in the video (that's usually caused by the temporal part of the filter).

Quite a few of the before/after samples are still downloadable from that first link above, so you can judge for yourself which approaches work best.

If you don't have time to read the whole thing, this was Nick's original PAL DV video:

Noisy Underwater PAL DV Fish Video

and this was my final "best" attempt at denoising it:

FFT3D is also very good avisynth plugin for denoising

Thanks to all for your help and suggestions. I'm off and running...

Something I've used for a long time for this kind of problem is NBFX's 'High Contrast' filter. (but not at the default setting) Doesn't seem to work like a normal contrast tool. Depending on the footage I also add in some Gamma, and a light touch of Neat Video to lesson any grain.

To all who've responded to my post on this subject, many thanks for the help, especially Marlon who took the time to run tests on the sample clip I provided.

I purchased the Neat Video plugin and can attest to the fact that it's a life saver. It works really well on eliminating video noise but you have to be careful not to over do the settings as they can remove too much definition from each frame of video. The sharpening function also works quite well, unlike the sharpening effect in Vegas which induces noise.

The only real downside to Neat Video is its extremely long rendering time. I applied the filter to about 40 minutes of video and waited about 8 hours for the render to complete which normally would have completed in under two hours. Small price to pay for such good results.