When I record video with my HC7, the video looks fine in the camcorder. Both while recording and during playback in the camcorder.

When I capture the video to my PC (using the Sony-provided capture utility), the video is very washed out and appears way overexposed. But when I load the captured video into my Vegas 8 Pro software, the video looks fine on the time-line. If I render the video out to mpg format, it still appears over exposed and washed out.

I also tried capturing the video using the Vegas Video captured utility. In that utility, as the video is captured, I can see in the video preview window the same over exposed look. But once I put it into a Vegas time line, it looks great.

Does anyone have any idea why this is happening? I thought it might be my video players or some codec thing, but I have downloaded several players yesterday and they all show the same problem.

Well, sounds like the raw footage is fine, that's expected... so that's not the problem.

Are your monitors calibrated? If all the players seem washed out, that'd be my guess - your monitors are set too bright. Strange that Vegas looks OK though, so still could be a player codec issue.

I checked the waveform luminosity and everything is below 100. So as you said, the raw footage looks fine.

I tried a bunch of other players and converted the video to several other formats with identical results. But I downloaded and installed the Neuview media player (http://www.neuviewed.com) and it looks fine in that player. I also tried the VLC media player and it is washed out like the others. I tried using Sorenson to convert the video to FLV and to MOV and they all look washed out (but not in the Sorenson preview window).

I found an option in Neuview (pro) called "Output".

It has 3 options:

1. Dx Blit
2. Dx Overlay
3. GDI Blit (RGB)

Options 1 and 2 give me the washed out look, but option 3 works perfect. Can anyone tell me what this means?

Thanks
Bryan

Your Overlays have the wrong gamma. I've seen this in some of the Vista systems playing DivX, I've also seen this in setting the Video to OpenGL in VLC on my system. Remember that PC gamma is 2.2 and some incorrectly set overlays could heed that 2.2 setting and give non-pure blacks.

I recalibrated my monitor and reset the gammas and the problem went away! I was confused about how it could look good in Vegas and in Newview media player, but not in any other player I tried.

Whatever the reason; now that my monitor is set up correctly, it looks great everywhere!

Thanks