If you can view on an external monitor first turn on scopes so all three show at once. Without seeing what you're seeing I can only guess. If you're talking about a fairly typical shot neither filmed in a dark area or a very bright area the luminance pattern should be fairly balanced meaning neither pushed to the extreme left (very dark) or extreme right (overly bright) when viewing the scopes AND your video on the external monitor. I woud trust the scopes more than what your camera or eyes are telling you as far as brightness levels.

Also look at the waveform pattern and toggle between luminance and composite. The entire waveform should fall withint 0 and 100. The brighter the shot the more bunching you'll get towards the higher values. That's expected. Depending on source a tiny nudge up or down adjusting levels, gamma (from the color corrector filter) can have a profound effect on the overall appearence of your project.

You can cheat a bit a go a little over a 100, maybe 105 for the type video you're making you're not worrying about having a "legal" broadcast signal.

What do you see? If the Histogram waveworm is just pushed a little left you can drop in the color corrector filter and bump up levels and gamma while you watch the Histogram levels.

Its very similar to adjusting levels in Photoshop which is the first thing you should consider when adjusting a still image which is adjust shadows and highlights, then midtones. Then move on the removing color casts, etc.. In Vegas you can also remove color casts (too red, too blue, whatever) by using the color wheels on the same filter.

Your goal should be to have a balanced picture on your external monitor that's neither too dark or bright and neither over or under saturated.

If your computer monitor and external TV aren't properly calibrated its sort of like that old story when five blind men are each feeling a dfferent part of some elephant and each of them giving a very different assement of what they're touching.

Another trick you can borrow from Photoshop is it has a info readout that shows the RGB values as you move the cursor over the image. While Vegas can't do it as well it does have a eye dropper (found under the media generator tab, bring up solid colors) that you can drop on another track and just push it around so that you can use the eyedropper tool. What you're looking for is a large variance in one of the RGB values. Almost always that's the color you'll want to tone down. For example if you get values like R 140 G 144 and B 200, your image probably has way too much blue unless of course there is a very blue object you're clicking on.

BillyBoy, thanks for the insightful information with the differences between computer monitors and TV or broadcast monitors. In Vegas 4 how can I hook up my newly purchased broadcast monitor and still retain the picture in the preview window on my editing monitor? Is it possible to view them both at the same time?

AFAIK you can't have both at once. You need to toggle the switch above the preview window so it either displays on the computer monitor or your external monitor. It isn't that you lose anything, just that you can't view both ways at the same time. At least I haven't found a way.

What some new users to Vegas may not know is the various display windows at the bottom of the track area are all undockable. Not only can you 'undock' them, meaning resize and drag them around on the desktop or to a second monitor if you have one hooked up, you can also rearrange them by first undocking, then dropping them elsewhere at the bottom.

For example I have mine setup so that the left third of the bottom of the workspace has the Video FX tab, the Surround Panner, Explorer and Media Generators. I moved the preview window to the middle all by itself and lastly at the right bottom I have the scopes all showing. This arrangement works for me, others may find a different arrangement more useful.