LeeThorogood said:
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When you say "There is no need to deinterlace" whats the reasoning behind this?
PAL video runs at 25 frames per second; each frame is made up two fields. Out of the 576 horizontal lines in a frame, the odd lines are from the first field and the even from the next. In your captured video, you will see that each frame contains fields from the same instant in time - this is known as progressive.
Interlaced video would have every field from a different instant in time, thus the odd and even lines in a frame would not exactly line up at the edges of moving objects, and you would be able to see combing artefacts. Deinterlacing filters are designed to remove these combing artefacts and give you progressive frames.
Simply put, if the source originates from film the frames are progressive, but if it was shot for TV (on a video camera) then they would be interlaced.
(I'm not going to talk about IVTC now because that's something you only need to understand if you're dealing with NTSC video).
To do the colour correcting I cropped off the black borders (letterboxing and overscan area) leaving a clean black background generated by my video editing software. I then used a space scene to carefully adjust the blacks until the space background matched the black borders.
If you are doing this by eye, then your black level setting is dependent on the calibration of your display. I suggest you run the video through a luminance graph or waveform monitor, if such a thing exists for your software, and watch the levels while you make your adjustments.