Yes - Sony call it iLink but its the same as firewire.
If you have Win XP its just to plug the camcorder to the firewireport in the Pc
When you set your camcorder to playerposition you could see its connected in
the capture window in VV4 and capture start,stop and wind the tape from the Pc.
I have Sony dig 8 myself theres no problem.
If you have dig in on yot camcorder you can easily get your work back to tape too.
You can also connect a VCR to the camera and capture from VCR through the camcorder (without recording) into VV4 - how about that?
Aje

iLink is Sony's name for it.
Firewire is Apple's name for it. (Yes indeed.)
IEEE 1394 is the name used in the Windows world.
But it's all the same thing.
Tor

I have a Sony DRC-TRV9 and can control this camera from within V4.
Ron

Works great!

Using the Sony ilink and the digital 8 camera and Vegas 4.0 and then burning to a DVD what's the quality like?

I have a Sony DCR-TRV350 and a generic fireward card on a generic Gateway pc. Works just fine.

Quality on DVD is Greeeeeaaaaat! as long as the original footage is great, of course...( I believe the pros have a saying along the lines of: "garbage in, garbage out!")
I do it purely as a hobby (including DVD...) and I LOVE it!! Mind you, I probably fall into the "garbage in" category :)....

I used the USB connection with the Camera and the quality was only so-so it was definetly better than an analog camera. Is there anything special I need to do in Vegas so that once I render and burn to DVD that I don't lose to much quality?

USB? That may be where the quality first suffers. Are you sure you are capturing directly from the cam's tape??...

To get the BEST quality to begin with, you must capture over the i.link = firewire (must be OHCI compliant) This in effect will mean you are copying the video from the cam to your computer. Once in your computer, you should set your prefs in Vegas to NSTC or Pal according (to your region), do all work/editing in DV (not in MPEG2 or 1). Once you are happy and want to prepare your DVD, render to MPEG2 from Vegas (once again choose the right template according to your region) - a bitrate of 8 MBPS will give you the best quality but its not always necessary and makes bigger files the higher you go (stay below 9MBPS) and then move onto your DVD authoring app, author the DVD and burn it to disk...

That is a very simplistic step-by-step explanation...!

Thank you! For your help I just wanted to make sure that it was worth buying the $70 dollar i link cable.

Where do locate this setting bitrate of 8 MBPS ?

jmquse,

I also use Sony Camcorder and Ilink, I never had problem and the "download" from the cam to the hard drive is fairly fast. I had to buy a Firewire card and Cable, I found one with cable at Fry's for a mere $25.00 (1.5 years ago). They also had this product in the "video" section for $70.00 to $100.00. So be carefull and shop around.
My 2 cents advice...
Thierry

jmguse,

To set the bitrate, go to file/render as.../choose "mainconcept MPEG-2". Then select your template according to region (ie DVD PAL or DVD NTSC). Click on "custom". "Video rndering quality" set to "Best". Now click on the video tab on bottom. Yo will see a slider with "video quality": slide the slider to 31 ("High"). Now at the bottom you will see the bitrate options: you can have constant bitrates or variable...type in the numbers and then accept all...

There you go!

In Sweden firewirecables costs 15 dollars.
You better look for other dealers than those who take 70.
Aje