Hello guys and girls. Long time no see. I've replaced my editing PC recently, gone to a Core 2 at 2.14 GHz, a gig of RAM and XP Pro. Vid card is nVidia GeForce 7900 GS. I've also given up my old and venerable DV Raptor capture card in favour of straight firewire. Now, my Premiere monitor windows are very dark, except when scrubbing. I have to virtually disable hardware acceleration to clear them up, and that causes problems elsewhere. Thanks to some archived advice elsewhere I was able to change some nVidia settings to make Windows Media Player display bright video but it didn't affect how Premiere behaves. I'd appreciate any input. It's really annoying to have improved my hardware by so much and degraded my editing experience in the process.


David Hurdon

Try updating your nVidia drivers. I had this exact problem lately, and figured it was a driver issue. An update fixed everything, including the speed of things on the computer as well.

Thanks, Eric, for jumping in so quickly. Between taking your advice and fussing with nVidia settings after installing the latest drivers I think I have it beat. The monitor window still isn't fully bright (compared to scrub view) but it's good enough and WMP output is what it should be, with hardware acceleration full up. If it stays that way I'm happy.

David Hurdon

I had this problem too until I uninstalled the latest and greatest NVidia drivers and installed an ancient version 81.xx.

This SOLVED the problem.

I had a reoccurrence of my monitor window problem after a bad system crash involving the Quick Time player. After removing and reinstalling it I went back into nVidia's control area and fiddled again with video settings and overall colour settings. I have an acceptable image now but I'm concerned about its instability, as I don't recall ever having this sort of trouble on previous hardware. If I knew where to find an old driver I might just be ready to try Eric's fix.

David Hurdon