I'm new to DV recently buying a panasonic DV-PV53. I am strictly a home user. But I thought it would be fun to work with my home movies on my computer to give them a more polished look. So I buy this Panasonic and it all seems pretty straightforward. I got a firewire card for my PC (Pentium 4 1.6 Ghz 512Meg RAM OS: XP) from Startech their PCI1394MP (XP compliant and OHCI compliant). I also got a 6pin to 4pin Firewire cable.

Things are looking good. The firewire card is detected and seems to be working fine. I plug the cable into the computer and the camera and.... NOTHING!

I tried to capture some video and movie maker gives me an error that there is no video device detected. Now I have more questions than answers. I tried panasonic's web site but there support web site (pardon me) SUCKS! I've cruised around and found this place so I thought I'd try here.

My questions...

1) I'm used to USB devices and how they behave. Should a firewire device act similiarly. Should my PC be "seeing" the camera as soon as I plug in the Firewire cable? and telling me it has a connection established.

2) drivers, special software??? am I really missing something obvious...like I said I'm new to DV and firewire devices.

3) has anyone else had a problem like this? ... is this the nature of the beast when working with DV cameras and computers. are establishing connections problematic?

All I can say is that when the camera is attached to my computer its performance goes downhill. That's why I tend to think the computer is trying to communicate the camera. The camera just ain't listin'. :)

Any advise anyone can give is heartily appreciated.

As long as the firewire card is detected fine (no yellow exclamation points) in device manager then you might want to try a different firewire cable or test your cable and cam on a different PC.

Windows XP picked up my DV953 over firewire flawlessly and appeared to use its own generic Panasonic/Microsoft driver.

Have you ran all of your Windows updates? Is there an updated driver for your firewire card on the company's website?

The link below is a screeshot of the driver WinXP is using for my DV953.
http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2003-6/74415/Firewire.JPG

Thanks Tommy,

I looked into the card again. I removed the card and then reinstalled the card. At first it showed the yellow exclamation point so I did an disable then re-enabled it. This cleared the exclimation point but did not help the card detect the camera.

AT this point I went out and got a Belkin firewire card. Installed it and it worked like a charm. I'm completely up and running now.

I appreciate your taking time to respond to my original query. and I thank you for pointing out something that I obviously missed.

Thanks again your help has been appreciated.