I have a Panasonic Mini DV camcorder which works well with Pinnacle 11+.  This was a replacement for my Hitachi Digital 8 camcorder, which will play my Hi8 and 8 tapes from former years as well as the D8 tapes made on it.

 I used Pinnacle 9 on my last computer, and found it to be very buggy and unstable until it was finally sorted, but of course it will not run on my new Vista machine.  But I am used to the Pinnacle interface, and "the triumph of hope over experience" led me to lash out on a retail 11+ultimate yesterday.  I immediately came to the site for the latest update, which I now have.

My problem:  The Hitachi machine is in perfect working order, and is read by my computer in the Microsoft bundled software and the bundled cut-down CyberLink suite.  It also worked perfectly well with Pinnacle 9.  But Pinnacle 11+ will not read it.  It records a "blue screen of death" from Digital 8 tapes, and broken, fractured images from 8mm or Hi8 tapes. 

 Why is this?  It seems unlikely, but is Pinnacle only able to capture from MiniDV?  It seems to do this very well, but I am starting to think I should return it to the store and get something else instead, as I have a big box full of 8mm stuff!

But I like the interface.

All help gratefully received!

John

Hello John. Welcome to the forums.  I believe your camera connects via Firewire.  Does the blue screen error looks like this? Kindly complete your profile so we know what kind of system you have.

Thank you for your welcome!

Yes, my Hitachi Digital 8 connects via the firewire port.  Today, Pinnacle will accept Digital8 input from it. 

On previous attempts the pinnacle program had crashed, showing a message saying it had closed and was attempting to send information to Pinnacle.  (It tried to do this via Microsoft Outlook, but as I don't have my email on that,  it failed.)   It was good to see it capturing Digital 8 today, though I have changed nothing at all! 

The camcorder will also handle Hi8 and ordinary 8mm, which was the reason I opted for it three or four years ago rather than MiniDV, precisely because of this backwards compatability.  I don't use it much for filming now, as my wife bought me a nice little 3ccd Panny for Christmas.  Thankfully, Pinnacle works very well with this.

When I try to use the Hitachi to input those older formats Pinnacle will still not accept them, but tells me to go to Capture and put in the correct details.  However, it works the transportt mechanisms on the camcorder perfectly well.  

 At least it no longer thinks there is garbage input, which it sometimes did before!  

This is all very odd, as my previous version of Pinnacleworked with it perfectly well with my XP system, which sadly went belly-up on me.  As I said earlier, I have been a Pinnacle user since version seven, and progressively bought updates to (I think) version 10.  I haven't attempted to install the old stuff, but I gather it will not work with Vista anyway.  I now have:  an HPa6325uk machine, with Duo E4500 processer, 3071Mb Ram running 32 bit Windows Vista.  the "Windows Experience" is given as 4.25.  My retail Pinnacle version is 11+ultimate, updated with the latest patch.

Thank you for your interest!

John

Thank you for the update.

One more thing to check, when the camera is conencted, it should appear in the device manager under Imaging Devices. The issue sounds intermitent. You might need to update to the latest Windows Service Pack and see if this makes capturing more stable.