Panasonic SDR-S100

[Venus]

I am running VideoStudio 10 Plus on a Vista computer. A have a Panasonic SDR-S100 camera, but VideoStudio won't recognise it when I try to capture directly from it. I get a message that says "Either no video capture driver is installed in this system or no device is connected". If I download the clips into a folder, I can then import them into VS, but it is a frustrating way to do it. Any suggestions?

[lancecarr]

Your cam records to flash memory cards. Because of that there is no "capture" process as such. There is only a tansfer of data from the cards in the cam to your hard drive. Instead of capturing all you probably need to do is use the "Insert files" function of VS to import the files either into the library or on to the timeline. The dialogue box that opens should allow you to navigate to the cam, when connected, through Windows explorer.

[Ken Berry]

As I explained to someone else the other day who has a Sanyo Xacti, your camera is a model which uses an SD card to record video on. I have another model of the same sort. But the point is, you don't use Capture on them. In a sense they are like the much larger hard disk cameras, and when connected to your computer, it sees them as an external drive with files on it.

So instead of using Capture, you can right click on either the timeline or Library pane in Video Studio and select 'Insert Video'. Then you simply navigate to to the relevant drive in [My] Computer (mine for instance shows up as 'Removable Disk (G:\)' and find the relevant files in the relevant folder on that drive (mine is labelled 'DCIM').

But be warned: inserting video this way does not create a new file on your computer's internal hard disc. As far as the computer and Video Studio are concerned, they know where the files are already and that is enough for them. The problem with this is, though, that if you shut the camera down, VS will no longer have access to the video files so you will file re-link messages.

So your options are to keep the camera on until you have finished the project and converted the video to some other format; or else, what you are already doing i.e. manually copying the files to your main computer drive and accessing them from there.

And in point of fact -- a long way of saying it -- I am convinced this is the right way to 'capture' video from these new fangled cameras!

EDIT: had a long phone call after I started writing the above. So when I posted it, I found Lance had already beaten me to the punch!

[Venus]

Thank you both. So it looks as if I have been actually doing the right thing all along!