When the Firewire I/O ports decided to pack up on my main PC I had a choice of trying to find other ways of getting DV footage onto my existing computer, or face buying a new PC altogether. For a time I was recording onto DVD disk and reconverting the VOB files back to DV within Premiere Pro. At top quality there is a slight loss but buggering about with reversed field priority made that an eventual non-starter unless I 'filmised' everything by discarding one of the fields - another quality loss.
Right now, I'm glad I tried the former route, although thinking that there would be a choice of converters to bring IEEE1394 signals in through the ubiquitous USB port foundered somewhat on finding exactly nothing. Luckily, I found this family of products which threatened to resolve this issue and read up as much as I could. I have used Pinnacle's Studio software before in its earliest incarnation, this was a revelation and cost-effective alternative to a prohibitlvely-expensive dedicated video capture card. It had a breakout box to capture a tiny resolution video through the parallel port which you could actually edit which the software converted into a edit list to control the camcorder and edit video recorder. The result - with care and a following wind - was surprisingly effective despite glitches and oddities here and there.
For this MovieBox, apparent issues with rank drivers and required patches was something I was confident I could deal with so went for it. It does DV capture and output which was all I really ever wanted it, and within my preferred editing program Premiere Pro. Just as well really, for the Studio 14 editing software looks good and probably tastes good. But the inevitable crashing became too much by taking the entire PC down with it - this is appalling for a mature product that when it works, works very well.
My reason for the three marks? The breakout box does what I wanted and does it well (through other programs than Studio) with the bonus that it works my more powerful laptop, meaning I have reason to keep that longer now. Future-proofing also means a wider choice of economical PC's in future without a Firewire port. Until I find any patches that will help the software though, Studio itself sadly remains as enigmatic as ever to me.