I have used pinnacle for a number of years..........what exactly is happening with the footage once you capture it and what codec is the footage in it's original form? Most helmet style cams that record to SD card record the footage in an Mpeg or similiar codec. Some older ones use a goofy codec that most newer programs will not recognize and therefore you must convert the footage to a different codec before capturing. What puzzles me is the fact that you are converting from AVI to Mpeg. AVI is the standard codec that I capture all of my footage in Pinnacle for editing. So it seems strange that your software doesn't like the original AVI codec. Are you positive your camera is recording in AVI?