I have a JVC DV camcorder and I just bought a new firewire card for my Dell notebook. I have 512 RAM and only about 10 GB of space left on my HD. Not sure if the video card makes a difference, but its a pretty lame integrated card.

Now the video plays fine on the camcorder, but when I transfer it to my PC, the video seems to speed up in places and skip around a bit. Is this the result of dropped frames? or could this be another problem? I'm using windows movie maker (ver. 1 I think) and have also tried using the demo of Pinnacle Studio 9. I've tried recording DV quality and MPEG and they both do the same thing. I also see horizontal purplish lines only when using the pinnacle software.

So any ideas as to whats going on?

That sounds more like your PC's video card drivers need updating.

To display video on a PC screen there's a special mode the drivers use, called 'overlay mode' that allows very fast direct transfer of frame by frame pictures to a region on the screen without the operating system having to do much work. A bad or wrong driver will cause strange things to happen in that region.

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System - Athlon 1.4GHz, Win98, Hauppauge PVR250 receiver and compressor.
Software -Magix Movie Edit Pro 10, Nero 6 + NeroVision Express, Moho 4.61, PSP 8.1, Bryce, Quicktime 6.52 pro, Goldwave 5, DVD-Lab.
Cameras - Panasonic GS9, Canon ES8400V, Canon EOS D20 and Canon A70