A digital video formatting system operates to format an analog format video signal to within a desired amplitude range using an adaptive filtering scheme which implements flat gain scaling, frequency-dependent gain scaling and adaptive offset correction. The adaptive filtering scheme selects a frequency-independent flat gain scaling mode or a frequency-dependent gain scaling mode based on the characteristics of the active video signal. The filtered video signal is fed back to an adaptive weight computation block to update the offset correction value, the filter coefficients and the mode selection signal.