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Hello -
I'm shooting DV video with my Panasonic MX3000. The results look GREAT on the built in LCD screen, not just because it's small and high resolution, but also in brightness, contrast, color saturation, and overall hue. Basically the images look perfect on the camcorder. Then when I capture to my hard drive via 1394 / Firewire, the video looks pretty bad on either of my two monitors (one of which is a pretty well calibrated flat screen).
So after capturing, my footage seems to require a LOT of time and effort spent on color correction, gamma adjustment, contrast improvement, etc etc... I spend hours working in Premiere, After Effects, and/or VirtualDub just to get the colors straight.
I suspect a couple of possibilities. One is that I'm using just a plain 1394 card for my capture input and it doesn't have drivers that would let me adjust color, contrast etc. at the time of capture. I'm just using whatever generic VFW driver is letting Premiere capture for me. I have been unable to capture in VirtualDub because of the lack of support for WDM capture drivers that would be necessary to use VDub with a plain 1394 card instead of a full-on "capture card".
Another suspicion is this: My Panasonic MX3000 is a Japanese camera made and sold only in Japan (mostly in 2001 to early 2002) and I have read that the NTSC video standard is slightly different in Japan, with a different "black level". Maybe I need a way of telling my capture software about this so it can compensate? I have not been able to find any way to do this in Premiere.
So has anyone had the same problem or similar? Do I need to really go out and buy a real capture card? I have read that even full featured capture cards only let you adjust the color balance, contrast, etc. when you're capturing analog inputs, and for digital input they just pass it right through with no adjustment. If that's true then a capture card would not solve my problem.
What should I do? I have one of the finest quality video cameras in the "prosumer" level, but by the time the video reaches my desktop it's worse than what I see from my friends' $250 videocams.
Thanks in advance for any tips!
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