I have Movie Studio Platinum 12, but am new to it. I want to transfer some old VHS tapes to DVD. My first attempt was on a homemade VHS that runs about 2.5 hours. My initial goal is very modest: capture the recording, add a few titles, maybe balance the color, and burn to DVD (double layer, if necessary).

I have the VHS cabled to the camcorder (an old Sony TRV-720), and the camcorder cabled from the DV in/out port to the computer (Win7x64) firewire port. I used the Movie Studio "How to" facility to attempt a capture. Specifically, I followed the "How to Capture DV Video" segment. These directions triggered the opening of the "capture" module of Movie Studio. I began capture. The preview screen gave a message that it would not show the video (why?). I left the computer room. Upon return about an hour and half later, I found an error message about dropped frames, and recording had stopped.

I found a 13 Gig unnamed avi file in my documents folder, and it was almost exactly one hour in length. (Is that a default? I left all parameters at default.) Upon importing it into a test project, it seemed to play ok within movie studio, but I'm not sure I'm approaching this properly. I want to get the best fidelity I can out of this old tape.

I will read about dropped frames etc., but would appreciate tips or advice as to whether I'm going about this appropriately.

Many thanks, Ron