Pinnacle 12 will not accept capture to Sony DCR-SR65 Mini Disk Camcorder

Question

My new camcorder has only an AVI jack and USB jack. Judging by some other responses, I need a special firewire converter to get this to load. My desktop only contains USB ports. So then I would need a 1) firewire with a connector/adapter on one end that gets a firewire to connect to the USB port on my computer and 2) a connector/adapter on the other end of that firewire that would fit into AVI or USB jack ports of my new Sony Camcorder?

Pinnacle says to use a 1394 Firewire which worked well with the old Handicams with a tape drive when I had one of those. This is something anyone having the NEW types of disk only camcorder and using Pinnacle 12 will run into.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Firewire comes standard on all DV tape camcorders.  That is the way it was designed, and that is the only way it works.

Due to the way video must be saved in order to fit onto DV tape, the movie is not "self contained" - can not be played or viewed on its own.  The video must be reassembled and rendered in order for it to be viewed.  When you play the tape in the camcorder, the onboard electronics do all this in real time.  This is why a 1 hour video requires 1 hour to capture from tape to computer.  When you capture video from the camcorder, the computer receives the re-assembled and rendered video from the camcorder and saves it in a self-contained format, so the computer does not have to do all that work each time the video needs to be played or accessed.

All of the newer AVCHD, MOD and TOD camcorders like yours record self-contained movies to miniDVD, hard disc drive (HDD), or flash memory - usually in the Quicktime mov format.  This allows faster than real time transfer of these videos through USB.  This transfer process is exactly like transferring photos from a digital still photo camera to the computer.

You will need to read your camcorders owners manual http://www.sonystyle.com/wcsstore/SonySt...  Page 41 on how to Dub Movies to a Memory Stick Pro Duo.  You can then use the memory stick to move the movies to a computer through a card reader or through the USB connection.

Answer 2

Firewire to USB converters are useless, but that's not a problem because there's no firewire involved - it's USB all the way!  Copy the video files to your PC using either the software supplied with your camcorder or Windows Explorer and then import them into Studio.

btw, they're AV connections - AVI is a file format.