Oh wow, that’s quite impressive!
Could I use virtual dub for a first correction then use Premiere Pro to do some tweaking?
VirtualDub doesn’t let you do pieces of a file, only the whole thing (that’s loaded) and you’re talking different scenes needing diff work. Ultimately if Premiere is to be in your workflow for sure then let’s hope it can do everything that VDub could do to keep your life simpler. I don’t have Premiere (!) so I can’t say what it will and won’t do for you with this, but I’d imagine AP could surely kick some pretty serious color correcting, contrast adjusting, etc. butt here in 2020.
But let’s say Premiere fails to go the distance in some spots and you want to give those bits an as-suggested pre-boost in VDub. If you do coloring work in VirtualDub you really should save it out as a lossless (avi) file, using the Lagarith lossless codec, so that you lose no quality (well, more or less; it’s up to you not to overdo the filters and jack up the image). If Premiere insists you turn that avi file into something else before it’ll read it… 😦 You’re talking a lot of hard drive space and computing power. A 45 minute BD rip when turned into a lossless avi will be about 100GBs. 😮 But if you have a powerful as hell computer and empty terabytes on more than once drive in your system then perhaps…? Or if you need only one or two scenes with such a pre-boost?
There’s also scripting (Avisynth) which is the better path apparently for things, but that’s out of my league to a large degree so I won’t suggest or comment. On this note, let’s see of others chime in with better advice and knowledge than my simple little mind is trying to offer. 😃
Who is Dr. Dre?
A feller known in these parts for being a wee tad decent-plus at working with movie colors. Here’s where he’s a bit active recently (currently)…
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Harmys-STAR-WARS-Despecialized-Edition-HD-V2-7-MKV-Released/id/12713/page/673#1366137
He created a legendary tool (although I haven’t used it myself) called Dr. Dre’s Color Matching Tool that’s used by people on many sites it’s that good apparently
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Color-matching-and-prediction-color-correction-tool-v13-released/id/18128