I have a firewire connection from my laptop to my DVC80. I am able to capture and see on my laptop whatever is on the camera LCD. However I am trying to playback the Vegas timeline from the pc to the camera and nothing is happening.

The camera is recognized by the OS, WinXP and firewire controls the capture from the camera but does not work in reverse.

I would expect if I tell Vegas to play to an external monitor, and choose IEEE device from the resultant menu, that I would need to do nothing else.

Do I somehow have to tell the camera that IEEE is being used as an INPUT device now, rather than an OUTPUT device?

Yes you have to do that on most camera's. I'm not familiair with
your camera, so I don't know for sure. I have to switch my XL1S
to VCR mode for this to work.

I guess I neglected to say that the camera was in VCR mode when I tried to do this.

As far as I can see I am doing everything right. On another camera I have, an inexpensinve DV8 cam, this requires nothing other than having the camcorder in VCR mode.

Well, ofcourse your camera just might not support it. I'm not sure.
Is there anything about this in the manual?

It should be identical to the DVX100- it does, indeed, support video pass-through. Charlie, maybe try looking up "video pass-through" or the likes in the manual. There might just be a menu nestled out of view that you need to change a perameter on.

Any DVX/DVC pro's out there know what this might be?

Problem solved...well lets say its not the Camcorder.

I tried this connection with another camera that also permits this. It didn't work. It turnes out that I have some kind of conflict using the USB cable to the External Iomega Drive while using IEEE firewire. If I unplug the firewire it works using files resident on the laptop. Its not an IRQ conflict from what I can see.

Thanks for your help Rob and Glen.