fix dingy picture on FCP?

i'm editing a re-edited copy of a law+order show
it was a direct output from one of their avids, and it's dingy-er than the show normally is. i think it got a bit messed up when it was converted to qt, or something. maybe their dvd burner is dumps.

anyways: what's the best way to increase brightness and contrast with FCP? a video filter? i know this can only fix so much, but...

No such thing as "the best way"...Color Corrector and Color Corrector 3-Way tend to do a better job than Brightness & Contrast. I'd dip the blacks a little and possibly the mids -- usually bad quality results in whitewash. If it's an offline Avid output that was burned to DVD, you've got two hits in quality even before it got to you, so I wouldn't expect great quality. You can sometimes give the illusion of sharpness by increasing contrast -- higher highlights and darker blacks. It's going to depend on what exactly the footage looks like.

Most likely the footage you are dealing with is probably in the offline codec, like 15:1 or 20:1.

It looks bad.

not sure about the received quality - but I found that a slight tweek in the gamma settings can work wonders if something is too muddy - but only a slight tweek - too much can blow out the picture and make it very grainy...good for fixing a poorly exposed shot once in a while - along with the proc amp settings - Andy