Herb,
I talked it over with a friend who works on web development, and he suggested that in my case the Sony capture device might be converting to MPEG 2 on the fly, no AVI file. The editing software requires the uncompressed format, so they won't recognize the Mpeg input. I ended up getting a camcorder with analogue to digital passthrough and connecting it to my firewire (I-link or whatever you call it) input. My friend said the digital input is nearly universal, and any program should recognize it. So far that has done the trick for me. I don't know if this helps you at all, as my case dealt specifically with the capture card for this media center pc, as the card is really designed as more of a Tivo kind of thing. I'm no geek, but I think the problem with these media center pc analogue input ports is that they are not converting to avi format, which is the uncompressed digital video. They are more efficient at creating a DVD on the fly, as they convert directly to MPEG, great for instant playback on your media center pc/television, but not adequate for true editing software. I guess that's why the "click to DVD" software allows only for cut and splice editing, and then not in fine detail, because your working on compressed video. This is all theory by the way, I've found no documentation to back it up. I do know that an analogue-to digital passthrough device, whether a camcorder or stand alone device (reviews I've read indicate you should be careful when choosing those), as long as it outputs to a firewire card (digital input on the pc) will solve the problem. Hope this is helpful.
