low light footage

hi everyone, might have an easy problem here.
My good camera was out on hire, so I took my Panny SD 4:3 cam up to Christchurch - just to shoot family stuff - get a few shots of the city post earthquake. The only issue I have is with footage shot at low light (esp inside bars). I know I could muck around with filters and plugins, but wondered if there was a method of fixing the footage that is standard practice.
All the dark areas (and dark colours) appear very grainy.

The camera uses DVC Tapes.

Any help is always appreciated. Might be able to save me a bit of time experimenting.....

Thanks everybody,

Pete

Fixing in this involves part aesthetic judgment, part color grading tools you have on hand and noise reduction.
One important tool for fixing this is the Curves tool in FCPX. I like it better than Color Wheels for this because you can adjust levels in very specific ranges depending on content.

What you need to do really depends on the individual shots and the noise in the video. The codec also is a factor as 10 bit 4:2:2 codecs do better than 8 bit 4:2:0 (or 4:1:1) codecs. You want to bring up levels where you think they need to be so the shot looks lit like you like it to be. Sometimes that can be bringing up the shadows just above black and the midrange a bit.
Then you'll probably want to deal with the Noise. NeatVideo is a great noise reducing plugin (The "Gold Standard" of video noise reduction) but there's also CrumplePop VideoDenoise in FXFactor.

Thanks Craig - I shall follow up on the advice. Sorry for the delay in reply, time sure is moving fast :).
Regards, Pete