Too dark AND too light in VirtuaDub

[Damfino]

It seems that my captures tend to get washed out in bright scenes and are too dark in dark scenes. I know VirtuaDub has a "squish luminance range" but it doesn't seem to make an appreciable difference, and I can't capture with it turned on anyways.

I've played with the brightness/hue/contrast a little but it doesn't seem to make a difference. The problem seems the same whether I use S-Video or composite. It happens capturing both live TV and off a VCR.

Any ideas? I recently switching from an All-in-Wonder VE to an AOpen GF4 Ti4200 VIVO, I didn't notice the problem before with the A-i-W, but I didn't use it nearly as much as I'm using the GF4. Is this just the way the GF4 capture is? Is there a filter that could help correct it? (Doubtful since the washed-out stuff is often pure white...)

[Damfino]

Has anyone seen this before? Do any other nVidia capture owners have this same problem? It's most noticable on video with a white background - Gap commercials are an example, they wash out so that they're almost completely white. (Not a big loss in that case, but annoying when it happens during something I care about!)

[fortension]

It sounds like something that cutting the contrast way back should solve. My current capture settings set the contrast around 70 (128 is default) and then use the levels filter to set the blacks and whites to be true. It's one of those odd things; first thing I do on TVs and monitors is crank the contrast up, and now I have to set the contrast much lower than default.

[Damfino]

Hmm. OK, I'll give that a try. The default is 64, looks like maybe something in the 50s might do that. I could swear that I played with that... but maybe not...