Hi - This is my first entry so please bear with me of you have heard it all before.........
I have just transferred my 1st video (using a samsung digital camcorder) onto my laptop (Compaq) using windows movie maker via a USB cable however I've come across 2 problems :

1. There is no sound when playing the video back through the laptop (using windows media player)

2. The picture is quite small when playing the video (6cm by 6 cm)

I thought buy just conecting the USB cable everything would work but obviously not...on looking through the web I've noticed port firewall 1394 being mentioned...my laptop does not have this port ...so do I need to buy additional software, cable, firewall card etc

can someone please help me as it's slowly driving me mad !!!! ?

many thanks and happy new year to you all

f)

If your camcorder is DV, then yes, investing in a firewire post and cable for your laptop will be well worth the money. It's a shame that camcorder manufacturers aren't more clear in the manuals that this is more or less the only way to achieve good quality transfer.

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Hi Wolfietim

What is the spec of your laptop? Unless it's got a nuclear reactor built into it most laptops aren't up to the job of video editing. You'll need 512Mb ram (1Gb recommended), over 2.6Ghz processor, a fast 7200 rpm hard disk (laptop harddisks are too slow and too small to hold everything) and a bus speed of 800Mhz. Speed and resources are the name of the game when it comes to video capture, editing and creating DVD's.

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