Once again I've been playing around with my capture settings. I'm taking MeBeJedi's advice and capturing at a more "neutral" brightness/contrast level so I don't lose any of the details. It's working out pretty well, although now I have to do separate color correction settings for each scene/shot. That's not so bad though, since I'll get much better results this way. I came to another startling conclusion tonight as well. I figured out why I'm getting that nasty ghosting effect.

It's my LD player.

I'm rather dissapointed at this news. After switching between composite and s-video on my capture software with the brightness hiked way up, I can see clearly that there is no ghosting when I use s-video. Unfortunately I don't want to use s-video for capturing because the comb filter on the LD player isn't very good and introduces way too much dot crawl. So Laserschwert, I guess you can stop trying to fix the problem with filters.

I have no choice now but to try a new LD player. Right now I'm looking at some Pioneer Elite players on Ebay, and I'm also going around to some pawn shops here in town to see if I can find anything. My top three players at this point (based on realistic priceing and availability) are the Elite CLD-97, CLD-99, CLD-79 and the CLD-D704. As far as I can tell, the only difference between these that will make any difference when I capture via composite is the video noise level, in which the 97 and 99 have the edge.

Anyone out there have one of these players and would be willing to let be borrow it for a while?

Hopefully I can get ahold of a new player soon. I've already ordered a new capture card and new Monster THX video cables today.