13. Saving and Editing Your Video

We should tell you right now that these camcorders all record in Advanced Video Codec High Definition (AVCHD) format. While this mode has the advantage of enabling shooting HD video, the format is still very difficult to process. Very few currently available software applications can edit AVCHD, and often you need to transcode into M2TS, a more easily recognized format. So much for consumer friendliness… Not to mention the computer muscle you need to be able to edit Full HD video: unless you have a Core 2 Duo and 2 GB of RAM, forget it.

DV, on the other hand, is still the simplest and most common format for video editing. All you need to do is connect the camcorder to a FireWire port and it’s automatically recognized. Capture is in real time since the data is stored on tape, so you need to record and rewind in real time. It’s time-consuming, but recording is done in sequences that are easily recognized by all editing applications.

The Panasonic offers software than can convert the video it records to the memory card. Called HD Writer, it’s a proprietary application that shows the video files in the form of thumbnails. You can join them one after another, but there are limits to what you can do with them. The camcorder needs to be plugged in to AC power to transfer video. Viewing your videos on a TV is very simple: you just connect it to the TV via an HDMI cable. It’s fast and works very well.

Caveat

Be careful not to modify your memory card; it must be formatted by the camcorder. And forget about using it as an external storage medium. Even with the source files, if the memory card has been modified or formatted by a computer, you won’t be able to read your files. That warning holds true for the Sony, too, and in addition, the camera blocks recording. Also, you won’t be able to export the video files on the card to your computer and then save them back to the card - the camcorder will no longer recognize them!

Sony also provides a little proprietary application called Picture Motion Browser that can process AVCHD. Installation is long, at around 20 minutes, and importing files is complicated. Plus, you’ll end up having to re-encode the files using Nero 8, for example, to be able to edit them with your editing software (e.g. Adobe Premiere). One positive point is that a PS3 can read the video stored on the card. If you have no Blu-ray player or game console, you can simply connect the camcorder to the television set.

Trouble with Corel...

Canon offers software for managing photos, but nothing in particular for video. A DVD with the Corel software suite is supplied, but it didn’t work - it needs to be activated with a code you must get off the Web, but the link led to an error page. All we’ll say is that it’s not very convenient... As a result, we weren’t able to process our video. On the other hand, to get a DVD you can read on a living-room player, you have to finalize it, which takes a few seconds. The MiniDVD is then playable - at least, on any player that doesn’t eat MiniDVDs.

Oddly, the Hitachi offers the simplest interface. The camcorder is recognized as soon as you plug in the USB cable. Installation of the software goes quickly, with information displayed in tabs. Viewing, however, takes fairly long. There’s a button for importing the sequences in M2TS packets; it’s simple, but takes a long time. There’s a big question mark about the HDMI cable. The camcorder wasn’t recognized by our Full HD TV… nor through a video acquisition card.