OK, I snagged a great film (as great as Super8 can be) of one of those nasty-nasty, pre-enlightment cartoons (The Isle of Pingo Pongo, for those playing at home).
This is a real, live Technicolor [sup]TM[/sup] print, nearly perfect, but the transfer is a bit on the ‘too dark/lack of contrast’ side of the scale.
I’ve got a DC30 card, Premiere 5.0 or 5.0.1, and when the Gods are smiling, I can capture an entire 10 mins of film before the machine locks.
The film has been (darkly) telecined to VHS.
Can I capture this in such a way as to restore the light and contrast? I made a quick stab at setting brightness up about 40%, but can’t see a difference in the image on either monitor (PC or Video)
Any ideas?
That’s it, check the body for typos, leave a huge one in the FIRST word of the title!
(insert smack smilie here)
You suggest ways to lighten it during capture but have you tried anything post-capture?
I have Premiere on my other PC so I can’t check now, but I would suggest capturing as-is, then looking at the filters once you have it on the timeline. I know in Photoshop you can brighten images easily by fiddling with Levels but I don’t know if Premiere has the same functionality.
VirtualDub can capture directly. Plus, you can edit, join and delete, so if you can’t capture the whole movie in one try, you can capture it in 2-3 chunks and join them together.
It has 2 side-by-side compare windows and lots of filters (like gamma correction) so you can see the ‘before’ and ‘after’ versions of the movie in realtime. Plus VirtualDub is freeware. Enjoy. 
http://www.virtualdub.org/