Perhaps your friend's PC has Win7 OS, while yours is an XP or Vista computer? There may be problems with the driver for Firewire on Win7 computers. It has been dealt with many times, search for "win7 firewire" on this forum.
Thanks for your reply but I have narrowed the problem down as follows.
My machine and my friends computer are both on Windows 7. Mine has an Intel chip my friends has an AMD Athelon chip
Both my camera and my friemds are set to the same settings
After trying to get the program to see the camera (the computer can see the camera) we uploaded his copy of Magix on his old machine which is and XP machine with an Intel chip and this loaded straight away and found the camera and started to capture the footage.
Are there any known issues with the AMD chips?
Many thanks
Graham
ps I will follow you suggestion and do the search you have given.
The situation is that dispte very effort the cammera couls not be made to work with that machine so the camera and machine have now gone back to the shop for them to try to sort out. Magix have provided a suggestion that it could be down to the driver for the firewire card and recomend trying a legacy driver.
After emailing Sales Support at Magix I received a very rapid responce to my query from germany suggesting that I change the firewire driver to the (legacy) one in the Windows 7 Driver Directory. I did this and within 2 minutes the program was working perfectly.
If this is the standard of support from Magix then I am sure that not just me but all the members of Morecambe Bay Movie Makers who are now using the product will be delighted.