Thankyou, zamiotana! I have followed your suggestion and downloaded MPEGStreamClip; also the Quick Time alternative that it seems to require. As my Canon produces VOB files, I can now convert these to AVI.

I found that MStreamClip presented me with so many options when exporting VOB to AVI that I'm really not sure which would be the best ones, can you offer any advice? Presumably the conversion should be lossless - and If I choose wrong options I will lose information before it even gets as far as PE4. On ething I have observed is that the resulting AVI file is much larger than the original VOB file - 6 or 7 times bigger in fact.

Which is the preferred format for PE4 - is AVI 'better' than VOB?