Twelve Questions of Christmas

by Andrew Alexander
Published on Dec 11, 2001 12:00 AM



In my mind, the holidays are not only a time for company and good cheer, but also a time to reflect upon the past and think towards the future. In this spirit I decided to look over the camcorderinfo.com message board and review the top twelve questions, in the hopes that it will save people from asking the same questions over and over. We’ll release one every day until we hit Christmas.

So, without further ado, here are the questions (and answers)!

#1 My camcorder doesn’t show up on my computer. Help!

This is one of the most common questions on the message boards. While the camcorder box says it’s as easy as plugging your camera into your computer and pressing go, it’s rarely that simple. Let’s review the situation. The camcorder has a port on it somewhere called "i.Link" or "DV" or "Firewire" - and they’re all the same thing. It’s the digital video transfer port, and this is what you use to transfer video back and forth from the camera to the computer. If you don’t have one on your camera you’re out of luck (you’ll need a more recent camcorder) and if you don’t have one on your computer you’ll need a PCI firewire card (for desktops) or a PCMCIA firewire card (for laptops). The minimum specs of the computer should be a Pentium class processor with a reasonably fast and large hard drive (I recommend ATA/66, 5400 RPM and 20 gigabytes as a minimum).

If you’ve got all this and it’s not showing up, there are a couple of things you can try. MacIntosh computers have supported firewire since day one, so if you’re having trouble there, I can’t help you.

Faulty cables. This is a frequent quick fix. Depending on the availability, try connecting other cameras to your computer, or your camera to other computers. Try using a different cable. If any combination works, you may have a faulty part.

DirectX. Ensure you have the latest version of DirectX installed on your computer. The current version as of this writing is 8.0a, available from the Microsoft website. While you’re there, ensure that you download and install the video capture update. DirectX 8.0a installs the latest digital video driver, and this corrects the problem for most people.

Operating system. If you’re using the original version of Windows 95 or anything earlier, you had better upgrade to something more recent (which probably means upgrading your hardware, too). Windows 98 is the first reasonably stable operating system to support firewire but many people have reported good results by moving on to Windows 2000 or XP.

Firewire board. Most firewire boards are "OHCI compliant" which means they don’t need drivers to function (they are supported by the operating system), but you may want to steer over to the manufacturer’s website and see if there are proprietary drivers for the board. At the same time you can see if there are compatibility issues between your firewire board and the camera, with any fixes.