which progam do i use to put movies from my camcorder to my computer?

[starskie]

i'm not sure if i lost the software from sony or it just did not come with any but i have some movies of my daughter i want to put on my computer. which is the easiest program to use? i have a sony dcr-hc21 if that makes a difference.

[daamon]

Hi starskie,

Your camcorder is a miniDV cam. It records to tape using the DV codec.

To get the movies from the cam to the PC you'd need to transfer by connecting the cam to the PC using the firewire port on the cam (also known as an IEEE1394 port or an i.Link port), a firewire cable and connecting to a firewire port on your PC.

There's various software applications that will facilitate the transfer, I use WinDV.

[vico1]

Ditto on WinDV!
Works great on my Canon ZR-700.

[starskie]

thanks will try windv. i already have the firewire cable and wire.

[Jim44]

Another vote for WinDV.

As a new user, there's a couple of things to be aware of. First, there is a known bug having to do with controlling the vid camera from the software. Just use the cameras start/pause/stop buttons:
https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?p=842293#842293

Also, the program can be configured to break up the transferred video into small, individual segments (DV-AVI is ~13GB/hour). This is helpful in working around the FAT32/2GB file size limit. But even if you're on an NTFS drive, some vid editors (like VirtualDub(?)) may still not play nice with >2GB files.

Hope that helps,
Jim