Quality of TV picture / calibration issues

[kev_in_fl]

Firstly, here's my system:
Win XP SP2, 1gb 3200 DDR, Radeon 9550 256mb 8x AGP, 1.8gb Celeron, ATI TV wonder pro capture card, Sony Vegas 5 and all the latest ATI software / drivers for the capture card.

The situation is, I've tried the Hauppauge PVR-150 and now the ATI card, and with both I could never get them calibrated to anything near the original TV picture (brightness / contrast / saturation / hue etc.) I'm connected via a 1m S-Video directly to my NTSC satellite system, so there should be no loss in quality due to a long cable. The biggest problems are a washed out picture where all the colors bleed into each other (even with the contrast and saturation right down) and never being able to get a good balance between pink and green on the saturation or hue controls.

I've also tried adjusting the separate overlay controls for the Radeon with no success.

Does anyone else have this problem, or any suggestions for a good calibration program for getting the right settings? Any help will be appreciated.

[lordsmurf]

Viewing on tv or monitor?

[kev_in_fl]

Viewing on a 17" monitor

[racerxnet]

Here are some links to calibrating your TV or monitor.

http://www.epanorama.net/links/videotest.html
http://www.belle-nuit.com/indexe.html
http://www.adamwilt.com/DV.html

Good Luck!

MAK

[BrainStorm69]

You might also try some of the free monitor calibration tools listed (and downloadable from) here:

http://www.benchmarkhq.ru/english.html?/be_monitor.html

[junkmalle]

Monitor calibration tools won't help. Computer monitors are supposed to have a very different gamma setting than televisions. Properly captured video should look dark and dingy on a computer monitor.

If you adjust the video capture so that the picture on your computer is the same as on your TV the file will be way out of whack. If you burned that file to a DVD the resulting picture on a TV will be way too bright.

Conversely if you adjust you computer monitor so that normally captured video looks like your TV everything else on your computer will be too bright and washed out.

If your final output is for use on a computer you can capture with brighter settings but you will run into color shift problems like you're experiencing.

If your final output is a DVD you should just accept that the video won't look right on the computer. Adjust your captures so that the DVD picture looks like the original source.