The Trouble with HD Video Cameras
If you are considering an HD camera, please read this post. It can be the best toy you have ever purchased or a nightmare trying to deal with it. For Christmas this year I was blessed with an Canon HG20 HD video camera and I thought it was going to be as simple as point and shoot. Drag the video from the hard drive on the camera and bam, open up any old free video software and you can do simple editing tasks. Then you can email your friends or relatives and enjoy the beauty of HD video. Well this was the worst assumption I have ever made.
First, the point and shoot was straight forward and easy, but selecting what quality to shoot in was the hard part. Do I shoot in Standard basic HD, or MXP (The maximum 
setting on this camera)? Well of course, if you buy a fancy HD camera, you want to shoot the max right away. There are two problems with the highest setting. First, it will record maybe 5hrs of video (not the advertised 22). Second, the battery (always buy an extended battery) only lasts about 30 minutes. Once you have your video shot, I would recommend Adobe Premiere. I tried Final Cut Express but you need to make sure you have it updated, or it will crash your comp. Corel Video Studio didn’t handle AVCHD at all, or at least I couldn’t figure out how to capture it. Once I loaded Adobe Premiere everything was smooth sailing for capturing and editing.
Now the hard part, what format to put the video in to share it, or how to share it? This is one I have still been messing around with. I wanted to see if anyone has any 
