Capture video from camcorder

Hi,
I am a Mac newbie.....
I have just bought my firm Mac, an iMac. I have a sony handycam HC44 and I am trying to caputer video footage with iMovie08 (looked very easy at the applestore).
I am using the firewire cable purchased from Sony (4pin to 6pin).
iMovie08 does not appear to recognise my camcorder, in fact the only device it does recognise when I try to caputure / import is the icamera.

Any ideas? Any help would be great...

Thanks in advance
Paul

Sony's don't have a great reputation for compatibility with macs. You can google your model number with some other keywords to see if others using iMovie are having any success.

sometimes you have to turn on your camera after iMovie is also open sometimes you have to open iMovie after you turn on your camera. I don't know why it is so fickle but I have this problem with my Panasonic camera. Maybe it is just because iMovie 08 kind of sucks Anyway, I've found that if I restart iMovie a couple of times I can get it to recognize my camera. Good luck. You can also download iMovie 06 for free if you already have iMovie 08. Unfortunately 06 doesn't do widescreen, just letterboxing

You can capture a still image from a video but you have to do it on the actual camera. It's explained in the handycam handbook, a pdf download (free) on Sony's website.