Black is Grey... Sometimes

[STORM5.0]

During the final weeks of my using Pinnacle Liquid 6, a strange problem appeared in that timeline/output window footage would suddenly 'lose some of its blackness'. Basically, everything on the timeline was suddenly a shade lighter in colour, as if 'black' had been turned up in colour corrector.

Blaming Liquid 6 entirely for this (it was failing in other areas too), I quickly finished off my outstanding projects and ensured I had made colourfast - i.e. 'fully black'! - .AVI files (for I found I could get the timeline output colour to revert back to normal by adding random things such as an extra video channel...) before I got rid of the software in favour of Avid Liquid 7.2.

So far so good with the new Avid, but during some encoding today with WME, I noticed during playback of a WMV file in WMP that the 'greying' is back! That is to say, the .AVI file I ensured was saved with the correct colouring had apparently been 'lightened' again during WME conversion. So I then checked the original .AVI (which I knew had played previously in correct colour), and that too was now lightened. Ran some tests in other media players: both .AVI and WMV versions are lightened in all but VLC, where they play with correct blackness colour. Then tried both files again in the other media players... and colour is okay again on both!

So that is the background of this unwanted phenomenon I am experiencing. My old editor, and current media players, display - SOMETIMES ONLY - my films in a lighter colouring than they should be. Because I can seem to get the grey to revert back to black by simply 'trying out other media players' etc (or bizarrely by adding new video tracks in Liquid 6), I believe the problem must lie not in the video files themselves - which seem to play with correct blackness on other computers, though I have not had chance to fully test this - but within my computer playback.

Is this a codec thing? Anybody shed some light as to what is going on?

Source media is Firewire-captured DV.

[senu]

Ive never had it before and I use Liquid too, as well as the media players you mention
Ill have a snoop around and see if anything turns up