The capturing facility on windows movie maker appears to have gone a bit screwy. The preview box is highly pixelated, and the result captured footage is too, whatever I specify the resolution to be.

Anyone know anything I can get off the net which will do a similar job to windows MM? It must be able to capture from a sony handycam, using it's own USB lead. Or is there perhaps some bug on the program I can fix? The preview screen on the camcorder is fine by the way, so I don't believe it is the camcorder to blame.

If its from the USB lead its probably a driver problem.. have you tried getting the latest drivers from sonys website..

Failing that.. screw the usb lead and get firewire... its a proper standard and works well

I think you'll have screwed some settings up somewhere.

May have to reinstall codecs etc

But - as a freeware alternative

Avi editor

Tried some of their stuff and it is quite good - and free

HTH

Jason, what format does the Sony output ?

Have you tried importing any other of this type of file (existing ones on your computer) into Movie Maker ?

If they don't play fine then the codecs will be to blame. If they do play fine then , as NeoVR says, it will be the Sony Drivers that will have been corrupted and need reinstallation.

It outputs WMV files when it captures.

I have just done another small video, using clips from an existing WMV and it joins and plays fine. It's just something to do with how it's seeing the footage on the camera. I'll try digigng out the sony CDs again. From memory, I never actually installed anything - movie maker just recognised the camera through USB and always just seemed to "work"

It outputs WMV files when it captures.

I have just done another small video, using clips from an existing WMV and it joins and plays fine. It's just something to do with how it's seeing the footage on the camera. I'll try digigng out the sony CDs again. From memory, I never actually installed anything - movie maker just recognised the camera through USB and always just seemed to "work"

Check sony website for drivers...... cds are for simpletons... as is usb

And if all else fails, check every single connection again - i.e. unplug, plug back in. Contacts may have got corroded from misuse. HTH

Hope you get it sorted.

Had another USB hard drive - kept 'unplugging' itself i.e. Windows error wav and then file transfers would die. Very frustrating. Turned out the lead was overstretched and presumably making intermittent contact. Had gone through shed load of info on XP and USB drives until I discovered it wasn't software related