My SONY Digital 8 Camcorder is connected to my computer via USB. I want to capture the video that I shot on the weekend, but when i try to capture it says that Pinnacle Studio Plus is trying to initialize a DV or Digital 8 Camcorder via a 1394 port. What is this port? It says a bunch of things, and then at the end it says to make sure that your camcorder is turned on (Which it is), is in Playback mode (which it is) and is connected to the 1394 port on the computer which i dont understand. My camcorder is connected via USB! the only cables that came with the camera when i bought it in July 2004, are: the USB cable, a cable to recharge the battery, and a cable to connect the camera to a tv/vcr! i dont know what to do! please help! Half Life 2 kicks ass

you need either a firewire card or or the pinnacle studio deluxe program which comes with a PCI video capture card so you can d/l the movies from your video cam. Just hooking it to USB will not do that for you. I use studio deluxe and it works great. It's hard to do a good job When you have a monkey on your back

so you mean that i have to buy Pinnacle studio deluxe which comes with a hardware card thingy? and that without this card i cannot download stuff off my camera?? Half Life 2 kicks ass

I'll try to keep this short. Pinnacle Studio is on Microsoft's list of programs with problems on WinXP and they state to go to the maker's site for a fix. But, I don't think this is related to your problem. I am new to WinXP and bought Pinnacle with my new machine but have not installed it yet for this very reason. I spent about 3 minutes on Pinnacle's site but did not easily find any fixes. I will look again another time. Long before I got this new machine with XP I had Win98SE and I have a Sony Digital 8 Handycam DCR-TRV140. It came with Pixela capture software. It has no special video capture card. I only had a USB connection. When I use Pixela to capture the video I must tell it if I am using the USB or the IEEE1394 (Firewire/ILink) connection. I use this same camera on my new PC with WinXP. I do have IEEE1394 and USB. I have used both. I do not use and have not installed Pixela because Movie Maker 2.1 works great. So, check out your ability to select to capture using USB or the 1394 port. Or, check the Pinnacle site for a fix. And, in the mean time, use MS Movie Maker to capture the video from this past weekend. My new machine does not have a video capture card either and my recorded videos came out really good when I burned them to DVD from the PC after using Movie Maker to capture the video from my Sony Handycam. HTH Bryan

sorry but where is microsoft movie maker?? Half Life 2 kicks ass

It is linked at the link I provided in my previous post that is identical to the following Movie Maker 2.1 or you may already have it on your PC. If you have SP2 then you have it otherwise you will need to follow the links to Windows Update where you can get the actual files; either SP2 or Movie Maker 2.1. Regards, Bryan