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If you are doing SD 4:3 or SD 16:9, the best format to edit with is MSDV avi.
500gig SataII drives are about $100 nowadays, a eSata enclosure costs about $30, a external bracket to move two internal Sata ports for external use is $8.

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You need a video card that supports 1920×1080 if you are going to do playback on a 1080 monitor/tv, I just helped someone use their laptop(HP with a AMD TL52 x2 Turion) playback footage from a HC7 on a Plasma, the laptop was able to read the footage and rescale it to the Plasma’s native anamorphic res with no problem using Nero Showtime and play it out the laptop’s VGA port.
The processor doesn’t need as much horsepower as would be used for editing.
Ideal would be a computer and monitor with HDMI ports.

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[xAbre1200] “Here is a picture of the problem I am experiencing”

What it looks like you have is letterboxed 4:3 in a 16:9 frame, what camcorder are you using? some models just letterbox 4:3 footage and maintain .89 pixel ratio, if you play the footage into a widescreen tv monitor is it full screen video of good resolution?

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When you turn your cam on does it show up in my computer under “scanners and imaging devices”?

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[miss2z] “I read that PPro 2.0 can take in DVCPro footage”

This pdf lists formats for Ppro 2, note interface, hardware, and codec requirements for certain formats.
https://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/pdfs/premiere_pro_formatguide.pdf

https://www.mainconcept.com also has DVCpro codecs

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[miss2z] “You have got to be kidding! Why?! How will I get this footage into the editing program?”
Problem is DVCpro is a proprietary format and Premiere has to licence it from competitors.
You will have to get a DVCpro codec to use the footage in Ppro, Raylight will do DVCpro50 and DVCproHD in Premiere, I don’t know if it will do DVCpro25 though, there are other DVCpro25 codecs on the web.
Also I don’t think DVCpro25 will playback in a DSR-11 over firewire correctly.

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Premiere doesn’t contain a Mjpeg codec, you can get one from morgan-multimedia.com, or you can try the matrox codecs.exe in the support section of matrox.com

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[myx_motion] “Yes. It was created using DivX Compression.”
Divx isn’t the best format for working in Ppro, interleaved with MP3 is very limited, I would search the net for a Divx to DV converter that will convert the MP3 to wav, then it will be easier to handle in premiere.

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Usually if you export via Movie(still WME) or WME, the Sorenson3 default data rate is 3.5 which will result in a larger file, so you can drop the rate down to 3.2 or 3.125 to get a size comp to DV, if you export to a DV.avi and then use QTpro you have to be very careful about the settings or you will get more compression than you want.

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The default is usually: My Doc\Adobe\PremierePro\2.0\Media Cache Files