I have a habit of capturing small portions of a VHS home video, then I make my scene cuts to weed out unwanted video and have also used the ability to brighten the video.  By the way, I am merely testing Pinnacle using Studio 10.8 which came with my Dazzle Capture Device.  I had NO problems capturing the videos. 

 Back to my question.  After I am satisfied with the results of my video, I like to save the file to an mpeg file and store it in my auxiliary drive to eventually include in the final movie.  When I play this mpeg file on Windows media player, the video has returned to very dark.  In saving the file, it evidently did not save my changes.  I also couldn't find where I could just Import these folders directly to the timeline. 

Of course being very new to Pinnacle (used Ulead forever but it doesn't like Vista), I am not completely familiar with saving projects, etc. 

You actually don't make any changes in the original file when you make changes in the project. After making your changes in the 'edit' mode and saving your project, switch to the 'make movie' mode and select 'file'. In the settings i would suggest that you select 'AVI' as the type. This way you won't get an loss due to compression. Keep everything AVI until you make the DVD, then it gets changed to mpeg.

Don

Maybe cuartetto is right. Have you outputted your edited project to a another file?

By default, the original captures are on the folder "My Video"

The Projects are on My Documents > Pinnacle > My projects (Replace paths for Vista)

Thrid time to post this link today about importing the file directly to the timeline.