Technology and Innovation

Camcorder Conclusion
When deciding which HD camcorder to buy, consider whether you truly are a hobbyist or a prosumer. Many of the smaller HD camcorders are ideal for both, but prosumers may need the extra features found in the higher-end HD cams. Always keep your end needs in mind when choosing a camcorder. Happy shooting.

What do all the editing applications that support high definition video have in common? They all contain ways to capture HDV footage using an intermediate codec, changing the HDV footage to a more standard and universal high definition (HD) format, which is easier to edit with.
The reason is that HDV’s compression, which is very similar to how video is compressed for DVDs (MPEG-2 TS, or transport stream), is hard to cut natively on an edit system. This is why the manufacturers of most of the major editing software provide an intermediate codec or offer one as a plug-in. The footage encoded with the intermediate codec can be converted back to HDV upon playback to camera or VTR, though with uncompressed HD, the file sizes can easily quadruple.

The first thing that the program asks when you start it is whether you want to create an NTSC or PAL project. If you’re just going to Blu-ray Disc, this question will seem quite strange on the surface, but the reason the program asks has to do with one of the line items on the box. The program includes the ability to write the same project to both Blu-ray Disc and DVD—a very useful feature that has the potential to save you a lot of time (depending on the scope of your disc authoring project, of course).
We found the process to bring assets into program a bit confusing at first. The File > Import > Media option seems a logical choice on the surface, but fails to bring in anything but still images. However, there’s also File > Add Movie. This is the one you want to use for bringing in your video clips. The program is also finicky about file extensions—we had some .m2t (MPEG-2 transport stream) files captured from a Sony HDR-FX7 HDV camcorder via Sony DVGate Plus that had to have their extensions changed to .mpg before we could import them.
The arrangement of the program in its default workspace (there are a few others to choose from) made immediate sense to us. The menu bar is arranged left-to-right in order of how you will be accessing the functions beneath (e.g., Timeline, DVD Menus, Simulate, Burn)