When attempting to capture video using a Firewire connection from my Sony Handycam to Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5, a message appears saying ‘Capture Device Offline’. Investigating the problem further, it seems a USB driver is not installed. However, when I try to install the USB software (from the camera software CD) Windows will not let me. Yet, I am able to capture images using the software which came with the camera, with no problem. Why won’t Premiere recognise the camera is connected? The computer is running Windows XP Home Edition.

When researching this question and reading through online forums, I found other users who have experienced similar problems but was unable to find a definitive solution for the problem. The USB driver is likely for when the camera is connected to the computer through USB. Since you are using Firewire, installing the USB drivers are unlikely to resolve the issue. Since the capture works correctly when using the software provided with the camera, we can rule out a problem with the connection itself or a camera fault, as it obviously has the ability to work correctly. Therefore, the issue seems related to Premiere Pro. There is an excellent guide available at ppro.wikia.com/wiki/Software which provides assistance for Premiere, including capture problems. Visit this page, and then jump to the section titled ‘Capture’ (at the time of writing, it was section 14, but this may change since the guide is a wiki being constantly updated). In the Capture section you will find a whole host of suggestions for resolving capture related issues, many from users who have also experienced similar issues. While the list of suggestions is long, I strongly encourage you to work through the suggestions systematically and hopefully one of them should be able to resolve the issue.

Should you work through the guide provided above and the problem persists, there is another article available at Adobe dealing with capture problems: www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/321276.html . Be aware, this article is relevant to Adobe Premiere 6.x so it may not be useful for someone running Premiere 1.5.

In any case, should any of the steps provided in either of the two guides resolve the issue, please let me know as I would be interested to hear how the problem is fixed.