"In my experience"
Don't use VDub filters for capturing. If you do, you're forcing your machine to do possibly intensive processing while capturing, leading to dropped frames.
Definitely set your brightness and contrast levels before/during capturing.
I've found (as has been said on here elsewhere) that the ES-15 tends to brighten up the picture a bit, and on bright scenes, you may get white-out. If the whites are too much, you'll never get the detail in the white area back in post processing/editing. So you've got to keep within the limits (I don't have a great grip on 16 and 235 so I'll just stick with what VDub histogram is telling me).
Here's how you set the brightness and contrast:
Get VDub set up for capturing, as you have been doing.
On the Video Menu, set
-Enable the Histogram (Video>Histogram)
- I also need to set Video>Preview (that is what I need for my card) to get the histogram to show. The black window will appear at the bottom of the video window. You should see some light blue signal colour.
Play your tape. You’ll see the histogram signal jumping around as the scene brightness changes.
To adjust the “levels”, use the Proc Amp/Levels controls (Video>Capture Filter>Video Proc Amp tab). If you can’t (Histogram and video frozen) read below re use of Graphstudionext.
The Brightness slider controls the left end, and the Contrast slider controls the right end. Adjust each to stay within the limits. I set the Brightness first. The limits may be shown by a red mark. Mine aren’t, but if you overcook either then you’ll see the hard limit the card is bumping up against and then you can decrease the contrast or increase the brightness to adjust the level.
I think my card (GV-USB2) only captures 16-235; that’s why there is a black no-go area on each end of the histogram.
Brightness High.jpg
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Brightness Low.jpg
The next issue is if you can’t control the levels while the tape is running, that is, when you go to Video>Capture Filter>Video Proc Amp, the picture and histogram freezes. This can be easily overcome by using Graphstudionext to get access to the Proc Amp, as follows:
Run
Graphstudionext (it doesn’t install, just runs)
Graph>Insert filter:
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Scroll down to your capture card>click it (one of the “analogue Capture” entries), click Insert and then close that window:
Correct levels.jpg
Right-click on the grey box showing your capture card, choose Properties, then the Video Proc Amp tab, and you’ll be able to control the levels while your tape is running.
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You can save your Graphstudio arrangement by using “Save as XML…”. That will make it easier to get to next time.