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Short story, my parents gave me their sony Digital 8 handycam

It's a DCR-TRV530

It's pretty simple to film and use, and I can show movies from the Handycam on my TVs. However, I haven't figured out perusing the manual and Sony Website how to transfer the 8mm movies to a PC. It has a firewire and USB port on the camcorder. Connecting those to my PC results in.. nothing. Googling this results in a bunch of BS that makes no sense to me, mostly along the lines of 'buy an apple'.

Any Handycam users?

firewire should be port of choice

I do this on my windows box


firewire from cam to pc (turn the camcorder to the pc setting)

load up windows movie maker, and hit record, it should start the playback on the camera and capture in real time

it's slow, but works pretty good

Lyion wrote:Short story, my parents gave me their sony Digital 8 handycam

It's a DCR-TRV530

It's pretty simple to film and use, and I can show movies from the Handycam on my TVs. However, I haven't figured out perusing the manual and Sony Website how to transfer the 8mm movies to a PC. It has a firewire and USB port on the camcorder. Connecting those to my PC results in.. nothing. Googling this results in a bunch of BS that makes no sense to me, mostly along the lines of 'buy an apple'.

Any Handycam users?

I have the same cam.

Do as Tikker says.

The transport (play, FF, REW, etc) on Windows Movie Maker control the tape playback functions via FireWire. It works slick and you can do basic editing, fades, etc when putting together your own production. If you want more robust features, look at a product like Vegas.

we always just import the whole thing, then use whatever video editing tools at hand to do stuff with it


GF does 99% of it with MovieMaker. there's enough in there to do a real nice amatuer job, and I wouldn't bother with anything else.

we then can take the finished movie and store it on the HTPC server and watch whenever (and home movies actually get watched this way!) or burn them to DVD to send to relatives

Is there a specific firewire cable I need? Checking for prices and some of them appear to be different.

I've done a lot of USB, never firewire.

Sony's version is called i.LINK. I don't recall if it's 4 or 6 pin but yes, there are different types of Firewire cables.

there's mostly just different ends for the cables, no?


my camera (a panasonic) came with the firewire cable, but the bundle of cables I picked up for my laptop had like 5 different firewire adapters, and there was one in there that works with it np

I just double checked, and mine says "I.DV" and it's a 4 pin connector

The PC one is a 6 pin to 4 pin connector. I asked the dude at Staples, and the cable itself had good info on it.

This was a complete snap, btw. I hooked up the cable, and the video capture in Movie Maker worked right away.

Thanks for the help.

we were really pleasantly surprised at how well movie maker worked