MiniDV (dvsd) colorspace problem?

[flashcoder]

Hi,
I have this old Panasonic PV-GS50 MiniDV camera which I use occasionally. I have always wondered why the recording playback on the camera LCD and through AV-out produces colorful and bright picture, but when I playback the footage captured via FireWire unsing Premiere 2.0 on the PC its almost black-and-white, very weak colors, everyting is dull. Why such difference?
I have installed pvdcodec.dll which comes with this camera (I downloaded it from camera support downloads).
Maybe I need some other codec as well? Maybe it a completely different issue?

I want to put together some videos on Premiere but I cant get past this ugly look of what I see there.

[poisondeathray]

How do you have Premiere setup and hookup up to?

PC monitors use different levels (0-255) than TV's (16-235) for luminance Y'. The 16-235 corresponds to 0-100 IRE in Premiere's waveform monitor. <16 and >235 (or <0 , >100 are "illegal" for video)

If you are using premiere, it should be hooked up to a calibrated reference TV, assuming your goal was something for TV (like DVD)

If you color corrected or adjusted it accoring to the PC monitor , without the aid of your scopes, the blacks would be crushed and whites blown out when watching on a DVD/TV.

[flashcoder]

I have my old PC (AMD Athlon2500+ if I recall, Nvidia 6800GTS etc) and Sony Trinitron 21 inch CRT display. Thats it. I thought you dont need any special setup with capture cards and stuff because its already digital stream coming in through FireWire. The rest is just software.
I know the computer screens are not very suited for viewing video material on them but I have this CRT exactly because I use ir for watching movies (Xvid, DivX, etc) it shows better picture than LCD.

Ok I have then this true-color HP-2335 LCD which is supposed to have the right colors because its S-IPS panel, I just connected it and checked, well it looks a bit better now. But still, I want to point out that the Composite output directly from camcorder beats everything I have ever seen on PC ever. I cant really explain. Maybe it has to do something with that chroma-subsampling, because on computer I can clearly see that some colors are too bright and some are too close to gray, and colors are somewhat washed out, looks like they "float" around abit..

I became really upset with all this issue because I had recently filmed a tape in snow and probably because of this high contrast environment this issue becomes worse and really visible. And probably the white balance was set to God knows what..

[JohnnyMalaria]

Burn your edited video to DVD or send it back to your camcorder and view it on a proper video (TV) display. Compare to the original. As mentioned above, PC displays will make video look washed out and dull. Even a cheap TV will look better. If you have a dual output video card with S-video/composite then you can use a standard TV as a secondary display for your PC and put the video window in Premiere on it. I have my system set up in a similar way though with a true video monitor rather than a TV. Nevertheless, even without a calibrated display, it will look much more faithful than a PC display.