I'll assume you're capturing from a miniDV camera via firewire/1394 (iLink), using the Sony VMS Capture program.

Activate the Capture utility, then click on "Options" in the tool bar, and select "Preferences". In the pop-up window that opens, select the "Capture" tab. The very first checkbox is "Enable DV scene detection". This box should be checked.

Scene detection is accomplished simply by watching the date and time on each frame that is captured, and starting a new clip whenever a discontinuity is found. (i.e. you stopped the camera when recording, and started it later for the next thing you taped, so the data on the tape shows a sudden jump in the date/time field.)

There is also a "minimum clip length" setting in about the middle of that window. If the current clip being captured is shorter than this setting when a scene change is detected (jump in date/time observed), the capture program will ignore the jump and continue capturing with the same file. That is, if this was set to 5 seconds, and you had a 2 second clip on the camcorder, followed by a 35 second clip, both clips would be captured into the same file -- because the first clip was less than the 5 second minimum. (Or at least I think this is how it works.)

Tim L