VHS capture dark
 

Forgive if this is a newbie question, but this is the first time I"ve tried to capture VHS footage.
I captured it through FCP with analog pass-through on a PD170.
Used the AV out from the VCR, then out to firewire from the camera.
The original footage isnt great, but the capture is much, much worse. It's very dark.
What am I doing wrong? THx in advance.

Is there a way to check the IRE levels...

Is the camera a Japanese or US market??

US
I can adjust setup levels in the camera mode, but not the VTR mode.
I don't see a way as of yet to adjust the incoming setup level in FCP - but looking again. It's FCP 4.5.
It seems that adjusting setup to 7.5 for incoming video would solve the issue - surprised there is not an easy way to do this? Or am I missing something very obvious?
I'm sure someone here has run into this before. How did you fix it? Thx

My personal preference after a few experiments was to copy the vision to tape on a PD150, then capture it to the computer in a separate step.

The many glitches you can get on old VHS recordings seem to upset the direct capture to the computer more than when the recording was copied to the PD150 and then captured. DVCAM seemed to be more robust than MiniDV when these glitches came along. I had tried copying on a JVC VHS/SVHS>MiniDV deck.


This is some old footage recovered via this route.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTl7ZsM3Fvo

Thanks. I guess if need be that's one way to get it done. Thing is, I've got a stack of old VHS tapes to transfer, each much longer than the 40 min MiniDV tape. So it would be a lot more convenient to just dump the entire thing at one time. It seems very strange that there's a lot out there about analog pass-through capture, but no one mentions this issue. I'm wondering if I'm missing something here that's right in front of my nose.

"It seems that adjusting setup to 7.5 for incoming video would solve the issue"

Yes....0 IRE is for Japan...They've got a different black level setup..

The question is,, how do I do that in this situation?