You got Movie Studio so you can edit your videos, right? If so, you don't want to capture in any other format. Yeah, right now you may think you do, but you'll come around and see the light ... sooner or later. The more compressed a format is, the less useful it is for editing. Stick with AVI, get a couple o' big hard drives. Have fun.

I second Chienworks point!

Technically, in fact, moving files from a DV camcorder to your computer isn't even called capturing. It's technically a transfer -- because the files you move from your DV cam to your computer remain in the same form: digital data. You can't ask for a purer workflow!

"Capture" (technically) means converting analog video into a form your computer can understand, with the most ideal format for it being MJPEG-AVI (the best compression/loss ratio). And, as you know, every time you change form or compress a file, you lose something. MPEGs, for instance, compress so effectively (about 5 to 1) that, though small and perfect for delivery, such as a DVD, can cause all sorts of issues if you try to decompress them, edit them and/or recompress them.

Chienworks,
Thanks for the reply. While I did purchase MS so I could do video editing, I don't necessarily always want to edit my videos just to view them. In my case, I have media devices at each TV in the house that are connected to my network that allow me to view all media stored on my office server. I have approximately 20 Digital8 video tapes that I'd like to quickly move from tape to server so that I could sit at the couch and go through them and essentially index them as I watch them. Later, when I want to do specific editing, I'd like to know which tape its on, grab that tape and transfer that specific scene (in .AVI format this time) for the purpose of editing. I know I could just plug the camera into the TV and view it that way easily, but my 3 kids can run the remote for the media device so they can watch all 20 hours of video at their leisure without having to fumble with the camera, tapes, cords, etc. I am currently doing just this with Microsoft's Windows Movie Maker because it allows me to go straight from tape to .wmv in one step, which is what I was hoping MS would do. Once again, I know .WMV isn't the best quality for editing video, but it serves the purpose I described above much quicker with acceptable quality (for my kids and my indexing) and takes up way, way less space. It'd just be nice if MS would offer this option as an alternative because, as I've pointed out here, capturing video for editing isn't always a user's end objective. So, it's not a matter of me '..seeing the light', but more of a matter of a user wanting software to offer multiple options so I can work the way I need to work instead of the software telling me how I will do a particular task.

Well, lunchroom, MS does advertise itself as EDITING software...

Regardless, glad you have a way of capturing directly to WMV, if that's your goal. MS, on the other hand, produces beautiful WMV files from captured AVI, so I guess you can say it does do what you need but in two steps rather than just one -- but with the added advantage of letting you cut out the dull parts.

And, if your home movies are anything like mine, there are a lot of dull parts...