I have afour year oldJVC mini DV camera and when I download (capture) the videoto my PC, the files created are rather large avi files. I recently bought a new laptop and purchased Adobe Photoshop 6 and Premier Elements 4 for it.

My problem is that I do not have a fire wire port on my new laptop (minor oversight) so I still must download teh videotomy PC. I have an 8 gb flash drive which I move the video to in avi format when it is small enough to do so. If the file is too big, I save it as a .wmv with Windows Movie Maker which compresses it quite a bit. What are some possible solutions to this problem as far as getting the larger files to my laptop? I know I could get a larger portable hard drive or even network the two computers but I was wondering if I am missing something else.

If you want original quality footage to edit on the laptop, AVI format is the only way to transfer it.Buy a firewire card for the laptop, they aren't too expensive.

Exactly. If I were you I'd stay away from Movie Maker. The handful of times I've played with it, it either crashed, or crashed the whole system.