A friend of mine upgraded to Express Pro and I bought his old version of Express DV. I know Avid no longer supports DV so it would do me no good to ask in their forum. Here's my question... Why does footage I digitize "stretch and darken" when I play it in Avid?? It's weird. When footage is "parked" nothing has changed. When I play it, it stretches horizontally and becomes darker??? What's going on here????

YOu might try visiting the Avid Xpress DV forum... since Avid still supports it.
http://www.avid.com/exchange/forums/47/ShowForum.aspx
But it sounds like you need to adjust your videocard overlay.

Scott,

If my memory serves me, pre version 5 Xpress DV and Pro versions had a strange Windows XP and graphics card incompatibility. I think that Avid had a patch fix for it. You may have to search the support archives for it.

Also, it only darkened the video on the monitor but the actual DV file is not changed. Sorry I don't know the actual patch, but that goes back about 4 years or so.

Good Luck...

Thanks for the advice guys. Looks like Richard nailed it. I did a search of the Avid forums and the problem points to the video overlay. I'll try adjusting that tonight and let you know if this helps.

Thanks again!