Cheers Jerry, I had tried all options before contacting Sony.

Peter Duke, This camcorder is new to me I used an XM2 before. I had just thought of using the camcorder monitor before I read your post. The display is a bit small but I guess I will have to do that.
I was more annoyed at the Sony help team dismissing the problem and taking almost a week to reply to my question.

Thanks

'Cheers Jerry, I had tried all options before contacting Sony."Tried them all before you discovered your flakey firewire connection? Suggest you click the "Default All" & try again.

...Jerry

I looked at winDV but it had stopped being developed at XP so I did not think it would work with Vista.

Get the free trial version of Scenalyzer Live. It's a simple program that does just one thing - capture DV.

http://www.scenalyzer.com/download.html

It's all I ever used for capture for years until moving on to HDV

Although I'm not using Studio I'll bet the capture apps are the same.

I've been capturing DV from a Sony DSR11 deck on a regular basis using vidcap for many years. Although Vidcap has some annoying quirks I've always been able to see a preview image from tape.

Others here have covered some of the bases in terms of plugging in the camera via firewire, and choosing settings in vidcap so I'll just add a couple of other points.

Vegas Pro has two capture applications. One is Vidcap, which is strictly for DV cameras, and the other is an internal application that's supposed to work with other sources such as HDV cameras. I imagine that Studio works the same way since it also needs to capture from these sorts of sources. So one thing to check is that you're really using the right application. In Vegas, choose File/Capture Video. You should get a dialog asking to select a capture format of either DV or HDV/SDI. You'd choose DV.

Also in that dialog is a checkbox to always use the selected format. If you tick this you'll not be shown this dialog again until you go into your preferences and change it back. In Vegas pro I don't see an obvious "public" place to make that change but it's probably on the Video tab in the prefs.

The other thing to make sure of is that Vegas doesn't actually have an issue with the canon GL2. Perhaps is does, which would be unfortunate because there's so little focus put on DV devices these days that you might never see SCS fix it.

Lastly, it's probably a good idea to make sure something outside of Vegas can see and control your camera. That'd be a good starting sanity check.

<edit>Another "lastly". Don't daisy chain your camera. plug it directly into your PC with a firewire cable. This may have been obvious but it needs to be said.</edit>

Rob Mack

Switching to a firewire card with a TI chipset solved all the problems for me.

Also, read this FAQ on the Sony support site and make certain all these steps are followed. Most are a rehash of what has been said above, but another trip through this checklist won't hurt.

https://www.custcenter.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1367/kw/Canon%20DV/related/1


Kent

Nobody has mentioned this yet, but maybe the firewire circuit on his camcorder is fried. If you are hot-plugging in your firewire connection, and on the computer end is the larger six pin variety of the Firewire connector, and by chance you try to plug in one of the connectors upside down, the power (one of those extra two connections) will jump across to the data lines and fry the firewire circuit inside your camcorder. This will cause symptoms much like you are seeing: firewire capture of video will no longer work with that camera. This is also one of the major reasons for some (of what seem like) extremely good deals on used camcorders.

"Nobody has mentioned this yet, but maybe the firewire circuit on his camcorder is fried."Yeah, I'm gunna bet a cup of coffee that when this finally gets resolved Rip will find that either that's the problem or it's a bad cable or a bad firewire card connector or something of this ilk.

I really have a hard time believing that this is a software problem with the Sony software - capturing DV video is something that Vegas has done successfully for years.

...Jerry

I've never seen a problem capturing DV, but I have seen a hugely frustrating issue capturing HDV with HP laptops a couple years ago. The firewire circuit just plain would not support it. (no app would capture it) Users had to get a pcmcia (or whatever the expansion slot was called) FW card to get it to work.

You have three items in the chain: camera, cable, and computer. I would try replacing each item one at a time to see where the problem lies. Vegas / VMS will capture DV just fine assuming all three are working.

PCMCIA = "people can't memorize computer industry acronyms"

I'd say there's more than three items in the chain.

- camera
- cable
- computer's firewire adapter
- driver software (use only Microsoft's, never install the OEM driver!)
- Windows device manager/router*
- capture software.

* I had the most annoying and difficult to figure out problem capturing once. Everything seemed fine. I had captured successfully just a few minutes earlier. But now all i got were "device in use" errors. Shutting down VidCap & Vegas and the camcorder completely didn't clear it. I finally gave up and went to work on other things for the rest of the evening. Next morning I brought Windows Explorer to the front to go find some files and discovered that the incoming DV signal was playing in a preview window in Explorer. Somehow i had accidentally clicked the "Microsoft DV Camcorder" link in the explorer window and Windows was "stealing" my video. I clicked the Explorer window back to a hard drive, and VidCap's preview window came to life and let me capture again.