My gear-
Sony TRV350 D8 camcorder
PC w/ Pentium 4, 1.60 GHz, 512 RAM, XP Pro OS, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Video card, Movie Maker 2, USB 2 card.

I am capturing band tour footage for posting on a web site. The footage is a little dim on the camcorder LCD, but even with the LCD brightness set at medium, the picture is still quite visible.

When I capture via USB into MM2, the resulting picture is always too dark, bordering on black. I have found no brightness or contrast settings on MM2 that are useable during capture.

I was able to change the brightness and contrast when playing back the movie file in Windows Media Player, but it really washed out the picture.

I would like to know how to adjust for a dark picture when capturing with my setup.

Would a firewire connection make any difference in brightness or contrast? If so, what firewire card of decent quality and low expence would you recomend?

Captured DV footage always looks heaps darker on a computer monitor than a TV. For this reason, it's always a good idea to output to a TV monitor while editing. I'm not sure if you can do this with moviemaker (anyone?).

You definitely should get a firewire card as well, because you'll be losing some quality capturing with USB (you also wont be able to output to a TV as easily using the USB as if you use the firewire connection). You only need the most basic firewire card, although, you might want to have a look at the possibility of getting a package that includes better software than moviemaker (or hardware acceleration).

well, it might also just be that your camcorder screen is bright but in fact you're really not lighting the scene correctly.

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Pentium 4 2.4C
1GB Kingston HyperX PC4000 Dual-Channel
Abit IS7-G
2x80GB Western Digital 7200RPM 8MB Cache RAID 0
ATI All-In-Wonder 9600 Pro
Sony DVD-ROM
NEC CD-RW
NEC 19\" CRT

I am not an expert on editing, but I have found a very nice freeware video editing tool, called VirtuaDub. It is very comprehensive. The only thing about it is that the user requiers some technical knowledge. You can become familiar with it in a short time, just poking around in the menus. The user interface is not complicated, but it is not as easy as 'press this button and it does it all for you.'

The author has made it possible to install filters for various editing reasons. He has a link to another site that has filters for a few programs, VirtualDub included. When video is captured and there is a darkening problem, the filter author has written two filters for Histograms. The filters balance dark and light areas, and can regulate brightness to a certain extent.

The author said that the filters don't work for every type of circumstance, but they might help you. It's worth it to mention.

http://www.virtualdub.org <--- has the editor

http://neuron2.net/ <--- has extra filters (many types)