HAS ANYONE BEEN SUCCESSFUL WITH SONY DCR-HC42E AND iMOVIE ????

It should work just fine with a Firewire cable. Sony calls them "i.Link".

USB is just for importing stills.

I have a Sony HC32. In order to get it to IMPORT a movie you need to Shut down - NOT Restart - but a total shutdown of the computer. Attach your Camcorder with a firewire cable and turn on the camcorder to the Edit mode. Boot your system up and go into Imovie. Click on Import and your movie should import. If you interrupt importing and perform some Imovie editing and then try importing more movies it may or may not work. If it does not work then just repeat the above steps and begin importing again. It is a Pain in the You Know Where, but I have not been able to get anyone at Apple or Sony to respond to this problem.

Does anything else work that is connected by Firewire? (Such as scanners, hard drives, burners...)

Here's a load of tips:
iMovie: Cannot See or Control Camera
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=43000

See the Sony fix here:
http://www.danslagle.com/mac/iMovie/usage/5020.shtml

I forgot: Please update your public profile to show at least Mac model and processor speed, amount of RAM, hard disk size and OS version.

In your first post you stated "G5". Is that iMac G5, PowerMac G5 or XServe G5? I guess it's not the XServe ;-)

Did you try everything in article 43000?

my new computer is a i mac G5, Processor/2GHZ, OSX, version 10.4.3, RAMS i think are 128MB, hard disc drive i could'nt tell you, where do i require that information

Hi Wayne. You can find this sort of information by going to the Apple menu and choosing "About this Mac". Then click on the "more info" button. You will have at least 512 Meg of RAM on a 2GHZ imac G5.

You can also use this to check whether the computer is "seeing" your camera at all. Connect it to one of the firewire ports with the iLink/ Firewire cable (not the USB cable that you would use for iPhoto) and then check what turns up under te "firewire" heading in the System profiler when you have selected "more info", as discussed above.

If it is not eeing the computer at all, then your computer's firewire ports may need resetting. Shut everything down. disconnect the camera, and remove the power cord from your Mac for about 15 minutes. THis will reset the firewire port if its protection circuit has been activated for some reason (such as trying to insert the cable plug the wrong way around etc).

Put everything back together, restart your camera and put it on the appropriate setting, and then see if the camera appears in system profiler.


Cheers

Rod