Is your camcorder a card based or tape based device?

Card based you need USB or a card reader, tape based you need Firewire or IEEE.
Tape based can be captured by PD without intermediary software.

My camcorder is a tape. When I said USB connection, I was referring to all the external capture devices use a USB connector to transfer the analog output of the camcorder to the computer.
My current camcorder does not have a firewire connector. My old camcorder did have a firewire and it downloaded directly - unfortunately that camcorder quit. Now I am trying to understand how to transfer the current tape camcorder to the computer.

Craig,

Depending on what aspect of your old camera went bad, it may still work to transfer footage from your working camera. Many cameras have a analog to digital (A/D) pass through option that allows you to plug a Svideo and/or RCA jacks into the camera and it will do the A/D conversion for you. You don't actually record anything on the camera, it just outputs the digital signal. Many users have not had much luck with PD7 doing this type of capture (myself included), simply use WMM for the capture and then edit with PD.

If this is not an option or a functional feature on your broken camera, then I'd probably consider a KWORLD device like DVD Maker VS-USB2800.

Jeff