Dark video when downloading DV from camera

[jebaker42]

I shot some scenes in low lighting conditions on a Sony digital 8 video camera. When capturing them to my PC, I noticed they are extremely dark, actually so dark that the thumbnails were vitually black. Playback on the LCD screen looked just fine. I hooked up the camera to a TV and watched the same video. On the TV, the video was dim but totally acceptable and this is what I expected. I also tested some daylight scenes and they too turned out much darker than they actually were. I used Pinnacle version 7 for capturing to PC . Any thoughts?????

[housepig]

are you planning to put these on dvd, or are you just going to play them on a computer?

If you are going to put them on dvd, get a rewritable disc and burn a short test disc with some of the dark material, and look at it on your dvd player - a computer monitor and a tv will display the same material differently, unless they are calibrated together.

you may find that your capture looks dark on the pc, but looks acceptable on tv.

if you are going for computer playback only (divx or similar), then check your capture app and see if there's a way to increase brightness during capture. if not, try filtering the capture through Virtualdub.

[jebaker42]

I plan to put these on DVD. Forgot to mention that I used firewire for downloading. And I have not figured out how to use Virtualdub and keep the same size file. I tested a 33M file and wound up with files 100M and larger. Anyway, I going to have a friend capture it on his computer and see we get same results. Thanks for info.