I'm having big problems with capturing HDV video through any capture program I've tried (ie. PP2, HDLink). After doing some research, I'm assuming that it's something to do with the drivers. I haven't found the HV20 in the Vista compatibility list on Canons website.

Using Premiere 2 with the newest trial of Aspect HD.

PC spec:
A64 3500+
3gb RAM
8600GT
Windows Vista
NEC1384 FW controller

Symptoms are:
HDLink: Crashes on start, or when camera is turned on
Premiere (various scenarios):
1.Crashes when the capture window is opened.
2.Doesn't crash. Device control works, but there is no preview, when trying to capture an error shows up saying "unknown device error" or something along those lines.
3. Doesn't crash. Only the play button works, there is no preview. Error "Camera driver is in a bad state, please restart camera and try again". Restarting the camera ends up with Premiere crashing.
4. Premiere captures a clip which is then transcoded using AspectHD. Capturing another clip ends up with the program crashing.

I've been working with DV for many years now and never had any problems, so I'm guessing that my FW controller and cable are alright. Tried reinstalling everything, even Windows but without luck.

Usually, the HV20 is listed in the device manager, now even though it's conected and running, it's not there. Only once after connecting the device did I get the windows popup where you can select what program to use the device with.

There are quite a few topics on this forum started by people who had similar problems but in most cases, Premiere would hang up instantly after loading. In my case it works every now and then.

Any help would be really appreciated.

edit: Did some more troubleshooting. Note to self - topic title should be changed to "all programs but Movie Maker". Can somebody explain this? Not only does it have absolutely no problems with detecting the camera, but actually captures the footage (unfortunately it insists on capturing the whole tape in one go). On the other hand, Premiere won't even detect the camera.

Hi Alex, noticed you are using Vista and I had the same issues as you (and others) and previously started a thread on this Vista issue. Your issues seem to be much worse across more than one capture app, but I've only found Neo HDV to be problematic under Vista, Vegas VidCap and HDVSplit both work without issues for me.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=97519

Nathan,
Strange how I must have missed your topic during the search the other day. Thank you for pointing me in the right direction, HDVSplit works very well indeed. It also seems to be much easier on the CPU during capture than Premiere was when it worked.

Nevertheless, it's strange how random these errors within Premiere are. I would accept the fact that there might be something wrong with the software if it crashed during the same operation every time. For the time being I will use HDVSplit, it would however be great if somebody could explain the cause of all these problems with Premiere.