Video Editing

I have a small video clip I took with my Kodak C743 camera. It is too dark and I would like to lighten it . This I can do in Windows Media Player but it does not let me save my changes. I can't see them putting those tools in there if we can't use them. I must be doing something wrong but I don't know what. By the way, with this camera a .mov format is used. I changed it to .avi and it still doesn't let me save the video. Any Suggestions?

Other than letting the player make changes, or changes with the recorder itself:

The only other way i know of to alter the video itself, is to re-code it & run it through a video filter.
Something like FFDshow filters, for example, set the brightness, contrast, luminace, saturation etc how you like it and have the encoder encode it with those settings.