Fixing extreme low light outdoors in post

PPro includes a tool used for grading clips that are still somewhat salvable. However, garbage in, garbage out applies. Denoiser III from Maxon or Neat video will help you denoise the clip up until 3-4 stops (which is 33%-25% of proper exposure!).

My personal experience is that After Effects (Ae) is far better equipped at doing these types of tasks. I use Ae all the time for processing my day-to-night timelapses.

Hope this helps.

Lumetri works the same, and setting keyframes on opacity is about the simplest process in Premiere.

Exposure is a straight Gain tool. The white point keeps going up similar to the Curves tool, until it cracks about 98 IRE, on the left side scopes scale. Then it rolls off the brighter values but keeps lifting the lower values. Tge black point stays the same.

Essentially, this is increasing contrast.

This sort of thing is perhaps easier to do with the Color Wheels tab, lifting the Shadows brightness slider and the Highlight brightness slider to keep the overall contrast the same.

Watching the RGB Parade and/or Waveform scopes is invaluable while doing this.

Neil

That may be a bit of a challenge.

It is easier,  especially for those without a fair amount of experience in both color/tonal corrections work and in key framing, to make simple cuts in the clip as it goes through changes. Correct each cut separately.

Then apply transitions to the cuts, extending the transition to maybe a second or two each way from the cut.

You may also need to do some major denoising to that clip, but that might even need to be done per section as in the above information.

Neat Video is really the beat denoising plug-in, though of course there is some cost. I have at times set Neat on a series of clips, testing the settings as you want the least amount that makes it not too objectionable, not to make it perfect.

And using 3-5 frames Temporal to the settings does a better job but takes longer to process.

At times I've determined settings on the clips of a sequence, then selected them all in the Timeline panel, selecting render & replace with both "include effects" and handles selected. Then went home for the night.

By next morning I had a clean Timeline with denoising finished. And could do the rest of the work on that sequence.

Neil