Thanks for your reply. Let me know how you get on. I have a laptop and don't think I can change anything on it. Neither do I have a card slot to convert to firewire. The feeling I got was that the USB transfer was not such good quality as transfering it through firewire. The only solution given was to buy a dvd style camcorder that records in mpeg 2. This defeats the object as editing mpeg2 is too difficult.