look intro this, and see if you can help :)

[Wiken]

I have a matrox marvel g400 card and the source i capturing from is mostly from a digital satalite receiver, my problem is that the videos seems alot dark and less colours.
Do mostly of you guys capturing with the default settings?
and fix them afterwards if the colours and brightness arent what you want
i mean like
or do you have any tips of what i could put the settings on in programs like avi_io and virtualdub etc? =)

[Eric VanHeest]

The G400 has a separate dialog to adjust the display properties. I don't know where this is in other programs, but in VirtualDub you can access it under Video->Display from the capture section. I've found it to be very much worth the time to play with the brightness and contrast before capturing (while watching various parts of the intended video through the previous or overlay). It is incredibly irritating to do a long capture only to notice that your resulting video is very dark (or sun-blindingly bright for that matter).

Once you capture your video, playing with the brightness and contrast in software is only marginally effective (especially if you captured to a compressed format like MJPEG). I heartily suggest making the video look good on the preview setting before doing any capturing (pesky analog input!)

[Wiken]

Eric: thanx for yer answer, but like i said much of my captures is straight from tv, an since that i dont have that chance to test each capture like you said, but isnt there any special settings youve found that works pretty good that you can tell me?
or do you allways start with default and then sese what you need? =)

[Eric VanHeest]

If some of your captures are dark and some not, then there isn't much I can suggest as a default. Sometimes my television captures are dark, but usually they're fine. The problem I usually have is with blinding brightness, so I tend to set the contrast down quite a bit (to reduce the difference between the "bright areas" and the rest of the video). I would recommend tuning to a channel you like that is typically dark and fiddling with the brightness and contrast controls until you find something that seems to work well.

I have noticed with television (especially SciFi shows) that the show itself is often too dark, but the commercials are bright enough, so I don't know what to say about that. I clip out the commercials anyhow, so a general increase in brightness and reduction in contrast seems to help (if I remember to set them before I capture). I wish I could save digital TV in a digital format to begin with - heh.

[Frank Marshall]

Hi Wiken,

Just a thought... but are your videos still dark after you've dumped them back to tape and watched 'em on your TV? I've found that videos are darker on my computer monitor but after going back to tape and watching them on TV, they're fine. I should really calibrate my monitor properly but so far I haven't found an effective way to do this.

[This message has been edited by Frank Marshall (edited 23 August 2000).]

[Wiken]

Eric i will try see if its work just decrease the contrast a bit though

Frank: hey hey, first of all i dont output to vhs ever, only vcd!!
but its still dark though,

[Eric VanHeest]

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Eric i will try see if its work just decrease the contrast a bit though
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Decreasing the contrast without an increase in brightness isn't going to help a dark video (it will just make is less sharp looking). When video is too dark I generally up the brightness as much as I decrease the contrast. It's all just trial and error, though.