in pinnacle 12 i tried editing some xbox 360 halo gameplay with my Adaptec AVC 1100 capture device (used program that came with it to capture) and tried to import it, all the scenes came up, but were completely black, but when i looked at the movie in windows movie maker, it looked fine what happened???? (tried to capture with pinnacle capture, came up blank there too)

machinimafreak:

 but when i looked at the movie in windows movie maker, it looked fine 

I'm thinking that the device you are capturing with uses a "compressed .avi" format, and Studio might not recognize that format. I read somewhere that there are over 200 different types of .avi format.

You might be able to convert your file, have a look at THIS.

Also, you could open the file with Windows Moviemaker, and create a DV/Avi file. The resultant file just might be the trick.