The problem behavior is not caused by my normal stopping a scene. I realize that the scene stops when I click stop. What is happening is that a running scene fragments and I find out how badly when I stop and get a screen asking if I want to rename the scene etc.. It then tells me I have XXX number of scenes numbered 001,002,003 etc. Have you ever experienced this? It also happened with my older Video Factory software. I can download with Windows Movie Maker without this happening, so it's not my computer causing the problem.

Thanks for the tip on Terminal Services. I had indeed disabled it and I turned it back on. Although I doubt it really matters.

you were saying earlier that you were having lost frames. I think what happens is that your firewire cable has a hard time passing through the data to the PC. Get a new firewire cable, AND, re-instrall the firewire driver.

If you're dropping frames, you should also consider stopping all services on your system that aren't necessary. Examples of this might be virus checkers, iPod service, Bluetooth service, SQL servers, update programs, etc. It's hard to say which of these you have on your system, look through the list of running services and stop any of the non-Microsoft services you can. You can stop MS services as well, but you'll have to be careful, some of them are necessary.

Second, since you said dropping frames on the 5th capture, it's also possible your hard drive is fragmented by now. You may want to run the built in Windows tools to defrag your drive. Also make sure that when you capture, you capture to an internal drive for performance reasons (esp. since you're having a problem with dropped frames). You may move it off to your external drive after the capture.

The dropped frames was because the cable was loose. Problem has gone away. I still get fragmenting. I had a chat with a Dell technician. He said that 1394 firewire is a plug and play and doesn't come with a driver;Windows supplies it. He checked my cptr and said that 1394 card and video card are OK. I tried saving to an internal drive and that was no help.
THE THING THAT IS DIFFICULT TO EXPLAIN IS THAT I CAN CAPTURE USING WINDOWS MOVIE MAKER AND THIS FRACTURING DOES NOT HAPPEN.
Why does occur it only when I use a Sony product?

Defragging is never necessary, not helpful, and in fact can be dangerous to your data. It's a lot of useless extra wear and tear on the drive for no good purpose. Just don't do it.

Easy solution: capture with Windows Movie Maker and edit in Vegas.

Defragging is never necessary, not helpful, and in fact can be dangerous to your data. It's a lot of useless extra wear and tear on the drive for no good purpose. Just don't do it.

While I disagree with this view, you are certainly entitled to practice what you find works best for you.

Good idea and Indeed I am capturing with WMM. The only drawback is that WMM is awkward and slow. But at least it works. Thanks.
I thought that maybe my virus software was interfering with capture. So I turned it off, but that was no help.

Are you sure your auto scene detection isn't turn on. Options?

Options: Preferences : Capture : Top Box (checked by default I think)

Enable DV scene detection (supported DV devices only)

Select this check box if you want Video Capture to detect scene changes in your captured video and create a separate clip for each scene.

Will automatically start a new file if it the software thinks the scene has changed

FWIW:
With regards to WMM - you can set it to full DV resolution (instead of just 640x480) and also, if you turn off the "make clips at end" (or sim) it's not slow at all - it creates a file really quickly. It's also one of the most stable video capture methods I've ever used!

(but nowadays I just copy from HDD built into my camera, so not used it for a while)