2 things.
1. What are you looking at when you are making the judgement that the footage looks ugly, colorless, etc? If you are looking at your computer monitor, not cool. Computer monitors do not properly display video. You should be outputting video to an NTSC monitor (or PAL if you are in Europe) to judge the quality of your image.
2. What steps are you taking to capture your footage and what are your capture settings? Should be using Firewire and capturing with the DV/NTSC codec.
