I bought a prosumer JVC with a TBC on eBay and an Elgato USB capture device. Captured about 20 VHS tapes to HuffYUV using VirtualDub2, no issues there.

The idea was to edit them in Premiere Pro and export lossless or near-lossless master files to archive on cold cloud storage. I will later use VD2 and/or AVIsynth to deinterlace and any other postprocessing before creating h264 files for the web.

So I spent a good amount of time editing them and creating slates (which I need for reasons I won't get into) in Premiere Pro. Sadly anything I export from Pr, regardless of format (even match sequence settings), is either too dark or washed out. It's not just my monitor or playback app, if I convert this back to HuffYUV using VD2 it's still wrong.

I suspect that with HuffYUV (or Lagarith) source, Premiere is converting it to and from RGB whilst assuming the wrong colorspace (709?). Premiere Pro's handling of colorspace cannot be changed or observed--is a black box all done internally, making its name rather ironic, but I digress.

If I use VD2 to convert my footage to mov files (ProRes or CineForm) then Premiere is able to work with those without altering them. The only 'problem' that remains is that when I do this HuffYUV -> CineForm or ProRes conversion in VD2 the footage looks different. Slightly better in fact, but different. It's more saturated, blacks seem darker but not crushed. Is this something I should be concerned about?