Incidently, biggest problem with setups like yours is the computer keeping up with the output, 720 x 480 works out to over 1 Mb per frame, you have to do 25 mb each second, most computers can't do it without some kind of hardware MPEG compression, software doesn't cut it. If fact hardware doesn't cut it often, too! The also sell "AV" drives for this kind of stuff, supposidle regular drive do recalibration every so often, and if you happen to be importing or exporting video at that time you drop frames. The firewire - digital video does work pretty good though, Sony is supposed to have a "digital walkman" that I've never seen for about $1000 that will do as a deck. Whole thing is pretty complicated!