I'm sorry, please ignore my post yesterday re no audio. It turned out that the problem was with the play back system, the DVD disk was fine. So to atone for that mistaken post, I can offer the following information that might be useful to another beginner. It is OK to capture video via a firewire running through an external firewire HD which is capturing the video. In other words, firewire is fast enough in practice, not just theory, to carry the raw data in both directions at the same time, even with a slow 5700rpm 2M cache HD, and a 500M powerbook. Again, my apologies for the mistaken post. Doug