Colour on captured DV

[Chordmeister]

I am transferring VHS video to DVD via a Sony DV Video Camera.
This involves recording the VHS onto DV tape via SCART->composite lead, then playing back the DV and capturing it via 1394 port, and lastly converting the DV AVI to MPEG-2 DVD with TMPGEnc.

My problem is this: when I play back the captured DV AVI on my PC, I notice that the colour has changed considerably - the contrast seems to be higher, with blacks much darker, and the colour is generally colder. I am having to compensate when encoding to MPEG-2 in TMPGEnc by boosting gamma and lowering the contrast slightly. Still, this does not produce satisfactory results in terms of colour, when compared to the original VHS.

I have taken into account that this could be the difference in response between my monitor/TV, but this is not the case, as the DVD played back on my stand-alone DVD player still displays the same symptoms when compared to the original VHS.

Could the DV codec I am using effect the colour? If so, is it possible to choose between codecs that windows uses, and that TMPGEnc uses? Does the software used to capture the DV effect the quality of the played back video? I'm using a little program called DVIO to capture DV at the moment. Will I get better colour response using anything else (i.e. premiere, studio 8 etc), or is it the codec windows is using that is causing the problem?

Sorry for the lengthy post... (I did try a 'DV to DVD' search, but to no avail)

[bugster]

Although just a guess, I would think the problem most likley is the analog to digital circuit in your DV cam rather than any software problem on the PC. AFAIK, the codec has no effect on the colour of the video.

Having said that, I have heard that checking 'Output YUV data as Basic YCbCr not CCIR601' on the TmpGenc Quantize matrix settings tab gives better color output when encoding from DV. As I say, I have heard this (on these forums) but have not used it myself so no am making guarantees.