Sorry, I've used the wrong terminology; I have a capture card installed on my computer. I should have stated that instead of using the term - Firewire.

Andy E - I have installed a trial version of Scenalyzer Live - it works superbly well and supports DVStorm as well. I will be buying the full version and using this with Elements 4. In the meantime, Canopus are still trying to sort out my problem with non recognition by Premier 6.5. Thanks again for recommending the programme, I will certainly recommend it to others.

Is the make of the firewire card canopus?
What I am saying is you maybe want a generic firewire card - nothing to do with video, a regular PC firewire card. Maybe the canopus one does something different and thus there is an incompatibility?

I use the onboard firewire port on my motherboard or a cheapo firewire PCI card I picked up, depending on which machine I use. I use that with the capture built into premiere and it works fine.

The capture card is a Canopus DVStorm2 and has been working on this computer with full functionality of Premier 6.5. Unfortunately a hard disk failure meant a complete install not long after I had bought it second hand. Since then I have had all sorts of problems getting Premier even load and now unable to use device control. However, the Support Team at Canopus are working extremely hard on helping me sort out the problem.

They have also confirmed that Elements 4 will not work through the Storm 2 card. The only reason for trying Elements 4 is that as a newbie, I find Premier 6.5 a little daunting. I am hoping that by using Scenalyzer Live to capture and Elements 4 to edit and author, I can move on to greater things with Premier!

I re-iterate then:

when you can pick up a firewire card for around a fiver why not see if it solves your issue?

Can you get your camera to capture on another pc with a regular firewire card?
Does someone's camera that they capture on a regular card with work with your canopus card? Have you tried the card in another PC?

From Canopus DVStorm2 Product Review - GuyGraphics.com

Sounds like this card is intended as a hardware editing solution? Definately trying to do something "clever", which sounds like it is broken. What I am recommending is doing it the "Normal" way. Just see if a normal firewire card will pull the data off the device. You shouldn't need this wizardry to capture from miniDV, just ordinary firewire should do.

I observed the card working with the dv camera of the person I bought the PC from, during a demonstration of how it works. I was able to get it all working ok when I first had the PC, both capture and playback. It was only after a hardrive failure and a reinstall that the problems have occurred. The fact that Scenalyzer is capturing using the DVStorm proves that the card is in fact working ok, but perhaps one of the Premier plug-ins is at fault.

In the meantime I am more than happy using Scenalyzer to capture and Elements 4 to edit beofre moving on to Premier.

I was not saying it was a hardware fault, just a hardware compatibility issue. A lack of drivers or codecs or something like that.

All I am saying is, that with a regular firewire card, problems such as "It captures in prog X, but not prog Y" simply do not exist in general because it is using a common standards interface, not a proprietary one. With the firewire card I am using, no driver disc came with it, it didn't need to as the driver is part of windows. I just plugged it in and it works with every single piece of capture software I have ever tried.

You have to ask yourself what your time is worth. In the time you have been mucking around trying to get the canopus to work, you could probably have earned enough to buy 50 firewire cards...

A previous poster said that the canopus solution could offer nice benefits over a regular firewire card, but stability was an issue.

Proprietry kit that does more than a standard piece of kit is all fair and well, as long as it works. If it fails, use a generic, standards based bit of kit. Trust me, I have 20 years experience troubleshooting hardware - if something aint working - always, always go back to basics and strip out crap that isn't needed. Once you have it working the default way, you can try and get clever with non-standard kit such as the canopus. At least if you have problems, you can isolate if it is the canopus or not by using the regular fw card, and when you come to a forum asking for support, people will not say "I can't help you much because I don't have a canopus card to test with".

An analogy would be if you had a car and the engine would not start, fuel guage reading empty.
You post on a forum saying you have a problem, and they ask how you are filling the car up.
You say "I have a robot that automatically fills my cars for me from a floating mothership. It works fine with my other cars and it has worked before on this car"
The obvious answer would be to say "Try filling it yourself from a regular petrol station, does that work?"
This isn't to say "Throw away the robot", it's just to eliminate if this bespoke way of doing things is what is causing the problems...