hi,

I have just bought a new camcorder - Sony DCR-PC109E and pinnacle Studio DV 9.0. I have installed the software and hardware, but cannot capture anything via the firewire card. When I switch on the camcorder I get the 'Add New Hardware Wizard'. But this cannot find the required drivers so I get an 'Other Device -> Sony DV-VCR' defice in the harware profiles. I have tried to change this to an imaging device using the MSDV driver, but this still does not work.

I have tried swapping card slots/reinstalling software etc.

I am using Windows ME.

Anyone got any ideas?

Cheers

Andy

[vonhosen]

Have you tried capturing through Pinnacle with Windows device manager showing it as "Sony DV-VCR device" ?

[MarkE19]

Hi Andy and welcome to the forum.

AFAIK DV devices do not have drivers. All the required information is either part of the firewire host or the firewire device (your camcorder).

When you connect everything up make sure you do it in the following order to make sure all hardware etc is found as required:

Switch off PC*
connect cam to PC via firewire**
power on cam (in VCR mode)
Boot PC*
Start the editing software (Studio 9)

* optional
** don't run cam on battery, connect it to mains

The software should now be able to see the camcorder and control it.
If Windows comes up with the 'found new hardware' window just cancel it.

Mark.

Mark,

I have tried that, but it still does not work. I have the 'DVin' logo on the camcorder screen when I plug it in, so it looks like the camcorder has recognised the firewire card. In studio 9 I just get the message telling me to turn the camcorder on and make sure it is in play mode.

Andy

[MarkE19]

Ah, I have just looked back at your origional post and see that you are running Windows ME. Sorry to say that I have heard of loads of people having problems under ME, but some had no problems on 98se prior to an upgrade and several others have found that moving to XP solves all their problems.

This is not much help but I think that ME was around for such a short period of time that MS did not fix all the faults before it was replaced by XP. Because of this I also think that many software packages never truely ran on ME and certainly many devices never had driver written for them on ME. Therefore you may find that your quickest & easiest method of getting video onto your PC will be to upgrade to XP, unless anybody else can come up with a bright idea.
Should also be worth getting on to the Pinnacle forum and asking them if there are any known problems with their software/hardware & ME.

Sorry I can't be of more help.

Mark.