When I am looking at HDV footage from my XH A1 on the fold out view finder of the camera it looks amazing; it's very colorful and alive. When it's going into FCP as ProRes and I am looking at that capture screen it looks VERY flat compared. Am I really losing that much quality capturing this way?

I know I am looking at full uncompressed 1080 on the view finder and I don't expect compressed footage to look exactly the same but it seems to look a bit too flat IMO.

Any tips?

LCD panels, ESPECIALLY cheap LCD panels like those on consumer and prosumer cameras cannot be trusted for gamma, colour, colour saturation, exposure or dynamic range. Having said that, it's certainly possible your computer monitor isn't optimized for video either as it is an RGB based display and the video will be YUV, which has a different colour gamut. It's probably better than it looks on your computer monitor, which is why colour correcting off a computer monitor is such a bad idea.

Good point Shaun but I do have a decent Samsung monitor (2ms / 3000:1) and it was color corrected by a friend that hung some thing on the front of my monitor and set it for me.

How do you do your colour correcting and do you use ProRes?

Thanks

Again, your monitor is RGB, (most commonly used) video is YUV. The colour space is different between them.

I capture ProRes and set black, gamma and highlight points using the 3 Way Colour Corrector with the Video Scopes open in FCP. My only true colour correction is usually to match colour so my Mac monitor is sufficient to make colours look the same, especially with the RGB parade open.

Your friend most likely used a Spyder, which is more for correcting monitors for print output accuracy (although it can work to help "normalize" a monitor; I've never had a whole heck of a lot of luck with them). I prefer to use Adobe Gamma to set my monitors up to resemble each other and to correct for slow variances over time, due to back light fading and any LCD issues that may develop over time.

Any tips?

A) Get a Kona or Decklink card with HD-SDI out to a proper broadcast monitor, or
B) Get a Matrox MXO out to a second LCD (like a 23" Apple Cinema Display or NEC MultiSync 2490WUXi)

A) Get a Kona or Decklink card with HD-SDI out to a proper broadcast monitor, or
B) Get a Matrox MXO out to a second LCD (like a 23" Apple Cinema Display or NEC MultiSync 2490WUXi)

Mike, can you proved some links where I could check these items out. When I Google them a ton of options come up with different models etc. Any direct links would be greatly appreciated.

Mike, can you proved some links where I could check these items out. When I Google them a ton of options come up with different models etc. Any direct links would be greatly appreciated.

Well, the info isn't really that hard to find, but here you go...

For the AJA Kona card: AJA Video - Serial Digital Video Interface and Conversion (http://www.aja.com/html/products_macintosh_kona.html)
For the Decklink products: Blackmagic Design: Products (http://decklink.com/products/)
For Matrox MXO: Matrox MXO - Overview (http://www.matrox.com/video/en/products/mxo/)