Hello, I'm a PC...

So, we have returned home from our vacation. Of course, the actual vacation ended on Thursday when we flew from Orlando back to NYC, but we've been at my mother-in-law's in NY for the past few days before actually arriving home this afternoon.

The first thing I did was get out the camcorder so I could start to edit some of the several hours of video I recorded in Florida. I've really been looking forward to doing this since we recently purchased a powerful new computer that should be excellent for video editing. I plugged in my Panasonic miniDV camcorder via a USB cable, but was rudely presented with a message telling me that it is not compatible with Vista!

Naturally I thought I should be able to download updated drivers from the Panasonic support site. After thoroughly searching, though, I found nothing. I even Google'd for Vista drivers, but came up empty. So, I fired off an e-mail to Panasonic support, and we'll see what they have to say. I hope they don't tell me I need to buy a new camcorder!

I guess I should have bought a Mac. We purchased this PC for working with multimedia, so we should have considered a Mac more. My wife saw it on QVC, and it came with a 22" widescreen monitor and HDTV tuner, so she figured it would double nicely as a TV in her office. It did record all the shows she programmed while we were on vacation, but I'll be very disappointed if I have to resort to my old XP computer to do video editing.

I mean, this computer has an AMD Phenom(tm) 64-bit triple-core 2.10 GHz processor and integrated ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics, so it should handle video editing very well. The 300GB hard drive will be plenty for my videos, too. It came with just 2GB of RAM, but it's upgradable to 8GB, which I'll do little by little.

My camcorder has an S-Video out, which I could then plug into the computer, but I'm not sure that wouldn't work well to capture video. I'm sure I could view it, but probably not capture it, at least not easily, and it wouldn't be digital-to-digital then, either.

While I wait to hear back from Panasonic, I will probably dabble with the video on my XP machine. Then, if I can get the camcorder connected to this new computer, I'll really see the difference.

...Steven