Please help recover colour

Question

I was asked to shoot and edit a concert for young girls who performed tap and ballet. I orginised 1 x 3 chip camera and 2 x single chip cameras to capture as much footage as possible. Unfortunitly on the night 2 of the cameras did not show and I was forced to shoot with one, my single chip sony trv120. In regards to editing this was a major let down, although now I have to use what i have.
I positioned myself midway to be able to film the entire stage and also be able to capture some closeups. The close ups are pretty good near perfect colour, although for all of the long shots seem to be washed white and have virtually no resemblance to the true colours of the night.
I was going to use imovie hd to edit the show although i have access to final cp.
Is it possible to use final cut pro to just correct the colours and then go back to imovie to finish the edit. Having just installed fcp it looks like I will have to read the 2000 page user manual before I can even start capturing the footage.
PLEASE ANY HELP WILL BE MOST APPRECIATED (yes, my daughter is in the show, so please help me get brownie points with my wife and little girl)
mario

Answer 1

i'm with michael here, dive into fcp and toss iMovie into the scrap heap, you won't regret it. the 2000 page manual is a good read.
several things working against you here on the main wide shot and the main one is the camera and the second is the auto iris. that little camera has a very narrow range of luma latitude to begin with and the auto iris didn't help. i'm assuming the wide scenes have a huge of amount blown out bright spots, the black levels are in the dumper and everything in between is kinda not there. one thing you can try doing is lowering the white level, raising the black level and increasing the saturation.
there are other more advanced techniques that can bring out more color but you'll need to get up to speed real quick with fcp to do them.
good luck. roll up your sleeves and get to work.
zeb