Capturing footage from Dvx100a and computer compatibility

[atinyplace]

Hey all.

I recently blew the dust off of my Dvx-100a and did some shooting. I love the quality of the picture, even though it's SD and things in this day and age are a bit limited when it comes to using it I have a purpose for it again.
My problem is I always used it with my mac, which I bought both in 2007, and have since upgraded many times and switched to PC. I'm having trouble getting Adobe Premiere CS 5.5 to recognize the camera so I can capture. I don't have a firewire port built into my laptop so I figured that a firewire to USB would work? When I plug the camera in it recognizes it but only as an unknown device. I read a few things about updating the firewire driver to legacy but when I opened up the device manager I couldn't find the 1394 driver. Do I need a different cable? Or am I missing something driver or software wise? I'm running windows 7 pro and any suggestions on how I might go about correcting this problem would be amazing

Thanks!

 

[David W. Richardson]

The firewire-to-USB solution has never worked, as far as I know. The capture software isn't looking for a camera device on the USB port -- at least, not your type of camera.

It's possible to capture footage via digital-to-analog devices that attach using USB, but of course the problem is then the footage has been converted to analog, which is probably going to affect resolution.

The bottom line, as far as I know, is that you really need a firewire port for capturing. If you don't have a firewire port on your laptop, you're probably going to have to use a desktop computer to capture the footage to an external USB drive, which you can then attach to your laptop for editing. Even an older desktop PC can handle this. Most desktop PCs don't come with firewire ports either, but adding a firewire card is pretty cheap and easy.

Good luck!