Capturing HDV to FCP7 - clips are dark!

Hi Follicles,

I'm having trouble capturing off a Sony Z7 HDV camera and playing them correctly in FCP7.

The capturing seems to go fine but once captured, the clips - when played back in the FCP viewer, canvas and timeline - seem dark and contrasty, as though the gamma has been turned all the way down and all the colours are somewhat askew.

I'm assuming my problem has something to do with my capture settings.

I'm pretty much a newbie at FCP but I was hoping to be able to capture in Apple Pro Res 422 (HQ) PAL and then stay working in the timeline with Apple Pro Res 422 (HQ) PAL. I have been told then to output the final product as H.264.

So in the Audio/Video settings, I set the Sequence Preset and Capture preset to various forms of Pro Res 422 (I've tried a number of different variants with the same outcome).

When all that failed, I tried to change the settings to Sequence Preset as HDV 1080i50 and the Capture preset to HDV while the device control preset is at SonyHDV 1080i50 Firewire. But still the same result!

I've gone to the actual .mov files and they seem to play a little better in QT but still the brightness and colour representation seems out.

Any help plzzzzzzzzz....