Fixing underexposed video with FFmpeg

Turning potentially ruined video footage into something very much useable, like magic the dark video is back to normal, vibrant with a little bit of extra noise.

I had underxposed drone footage due to the phone screen brightness not being enough to see that i had the EV set to negative max. The footage was bad

Thats exactly what my footage was.

Using FFmpeg gamma and saturation filter i went through some values to find a sweet spot.

In the end it was -vf eq=gamma=1.7:saturation=1.7

Here are comparisons from the original underexposed footage to the FFmpeg corrected

The video did get a bit more noise but now you can see what the footage contains.

Here are screen shots starting at gamma 1.2 through to 2