Running under XP-SP2, we want to transfer a video from a Sony TRV7E DV camera to a desktop pc using Pinnacle Studio 9.4 (or 10.5).

Pinnacle tells us that it doesn’t “see” a DV camera which is probably not switched on.

In fact, when you go into the Device Manager in the Control Panel, the IEEE 1394 controller item is displayed with the clasical black exclamation mark against a yellow background. Thus, the SONY IEEE card (in a PCI slot) is recognized but apparently the proper driver is missing.

We tried to install several drivers through the update driver option. No appropriate driver was found in XP-SP2 nor was any of the drivers we downloaded ok.

Is there any particular driver we could download?

You need the driver for the Firewire PCI card or it's chipset. If it came with the camera you should be able to get a driver from Sony support website. Oterwise try to determine the card manufacturer and get a driver from them.

Sometimes if you remove the device from the device manager and reboot the computer it will re-install a working driver.

Thanks for the tip. It's on a friend's pc so I'll report back next Thursday.

Windows update will download the "firewire" driver. go there and check the option "custom" it will search your computer and list the needed driver in the hardware update list along with any other things that need updates.

It has been a while since I used pinnacle but they used to furnish a capture card that was for their program...the program would not see any other cameras without using that card or you had to have all ready uploaded to your harddrive.

I had a firewire PCI card that came with my Sony Camcorder (when firewire had just been adopted) . The driver from the disk had problems and they did not have an update at Sony. The chipset was Texas Instruments, I was able to find several other card drivers with the same chipset but I could not get any to work. I finally just bought another brand firewire card.

If you can't seem to get it working, a new card is a little as $13 US
Newegg.com - SYBA PCI to Firewire 1394a 3+1 ports controller card Model SD-NEC-4F - Add-On Cards

On the SONY site, they tell you that they don't supply drivers for their card, at least for the model I mentioned.

Reinstall the 1394 Firewire drivers from your motherboard driver cd.

You might need to rethink using any of Pinnacle's POS hardware/software as well...

I tried several drivers which did not work. Apparently, everything worked fine under Windows Me, the worst Windows ever marketed by Microsoft.

I'll be testing the card on a separate pc. If it still doesn't work, we'll buy a new card. Thank you for your help.