I am going to show you how to add videos to your computer from your camcorder. Now of course some things may not be the same with different equipment and I am going to let you know what equipment I used but for the most part it should work with most computers and camcorders. I was able to add the videos with both windows xp and windows vista though there are some limitations with vista you can’t use the usb with the new version of windows movie maker, you will need to use a firewire cable which is a lot better quality and faster than usb so I would recommend utilizing the firewire cable if you have a firewire port.
Windows XP or Windows Vista
Computer with firewire port (optional on windows xp)
Usb port works with Windows Xp
Firewire Cable
Windows Movie Maker
My equipment
Dell Computer with Windows Xp with Windows Movie Maker
HP Laptop with Windows Vista with Windows Movie Maker version 6.0
Sony Handycam model # DCR-HC21
4 pin to 4 pin firewire cable
Now the first problem I ran into when I first started was when I connected my Usb to the camera and computer it wasn’t recognizing the camera, this took me the longest of all my problems so far and it was of course the simplest of problems. One of course was the drivers which it took me a very long time to find because I had all kinds of problems downloading it directly from sony because I don’t have the original disk and the serial #. Well if I had that I would have no need to download the drivers from their website that made me crazy, anyways I did find the usb drivers for sony dcr-hc21. The other problem after the drivers were download was I didn’t have the camera set to usb stream on the settings this really made me feel stupid after It took me hours to find the solution on google.
Ok now that I took my share of dum dum pills we have what we need to add the videos from the camcorder to the computer with windows movie maker version 6.0.
- Hook up your Usb or firewire cable to both camera and computer
- Open windows movie maker (version 6.0) and power on camcorder
- Import video screen will pop up you then can name your video and input it to a specific folder you want and save the format I save it as an avi.
- Now you can rewind to where you want to start importing and press play on camcorder then click the start import button on windows movie maker. Click stop importing when video ends.
- Then click finish and it will add the video to the folder you specified and also put into the windows movie maker and we will show you how to make changes in windows movie maker.
It is that easy once you know what the heck you are doing.