I bought a Sony IP7 a year ago and have had a lot of trouble capturing
video onto PC.

With a Dell C810 laptop, PIII 800mhz 500Mb 20gb hdd built in firewire.
Using Movie Shaker 3.1.

The problem: when capturing, the playback both on pc and camera has
many artifacts, and video skips. Accompanied by sound loss. This
transfers through to the captured mmv file.

I figured it must be hard disk and tried with and without a swap file
- no joy.
So I bought a high speed lacie drive - no joy.
Tried several firewire cables - no joy.

I read google groups and discovered a very strange work around.
During playback on movieshaker, flick from capture tab to editing tab,
then back again - suddenly crystal clear video and audio?!

This was annoying, but it kept me going for about a year.

BUT, I've just recently bought a DVD writer and I'm all excited about
digital video again. So I went out and bought Pinnacle Studio 8, now
that it is compatible with micromv cameras.

Guess what, same problem as movieshaker - but I don't have a
workaround now, and don't want to go back to movieshaker after
spending cash on another tool!

Anyone else had these problems? I've read a few things about micromv
problems, but none seem to emulate exactly the problems I'm having.

Full spec of kit below:

I've already mentioned the Dell. Now I have:

Sony Vaio GRZ615S
P4 2.4Ghz
500mb
40GB HDD
Inbuilt firewire OHCI compliant
PCMCIA Firewire TI chipset OHCI compliant
Pinnacle Studio 8.8.17.0
MovieShaker 3.3.03.11070 (workaround still works)

Tried with and without Lacie 80gb drive, and both firewire options.
And yes, I've tried about 4 different firewire cables!

Sempai