Why cant i captu footage from my panasonic pv-gs85?

Question

i bought the panasonic pv-gs85 camcorder and i'm trying to capture the footage off of the camera. my computer did not come with a firewire port so i bought a cardbus firewire port adapter for my laptop and pluged the cam up to capture the footage. nothing happened on the camera though. none of the drivers installed or anything. after working with it for a while i began to give up and think that maybe the cardbus port is cheep and broken. but while i was looking at the list of my devices on the control panel, i began to notice that when i plugin or unplug the firewire from the cardbus port that the list of devices goes away and then comes back almost like it does when you plug a device into your cpu and it notices it. i've also tried to capture my footage through the usb cable but im still not entirely sure thats even possible. if anybody in this hopeless little world might be able to help i just might give you my soul or something.

Answer 1

Firstly the USB is a dead end that is for using your camcorder as a webcam,(i tried it)

if you`re using Vista it should SEE your camcorder straight off the bat, but plug the firewire into your kit before turning anything on ( ie link up before power up)

start Laptop then when its finished booting up completely, start your camcorder up and it SHOULD ring and ask you what you want to do with your camcorder....similar to when you plug a device into USB.

if its XP your running try and get the drivers from the panasonic website and install them.

Failing that try it on a friends PC with an established firewire connection , that way you can rule out faults on the camcorder side.

however at the end of all this you STILL NEED software to "capture" footage (movie maker comes inbuilt into xp and vista) use that to kick off with. good luck  

i think your laptop seeing the cardbus as a device maybe??