What I've learnt about HD camcorders

I recently had the need to buy my very first camcorder. Of course being the techny guy I am I already knew a fair bit about them, I was familiar with the media choices (DV, hard drive, DVD), the format options (standard, HD 1080i, HD 1080p) and the benefits and challenges associated with each.

In the end I decided on the Canon HG10, a high definition 1080p capable (24 fps) camcorder which records to a 40GB hard drive. During my initial research it had great reviews and I managed to find an excellent price (by Canadian standards) on one at the local Best Buy. Plus it uses the new "standard" for HD video, a format called AVCHD. More on this format shortly.

Of course the first thing I wanted to do after getting it home was learn as much about the features as possible. I quickly recorded some video, plugged it in to the computer, and started to figure out how to best transfer and edit the video.

Here's where I really started to learn about the AVCHD format and what it's all about. As it turns out, AVCHD is not THE standard but one of two standards, the other being HDV. And it turns out that AVCHD vs HDV camcorders are related in a minor way to the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD war. This is because AVCHD is almost identical to the video format used by Blu-ray and can be played on Blu-ray players without re-encoding, wheras HDV format, while not the same as HD-DVD, can be natively played on HD-DVD players (from what I understand so far anyway).

Does this even matter? Well yes and no. The camcorder is hard drive so the video format used internally really makes no difference. However once you get the video on a PC this is where the challenge comes in. If you just want to view it or transfer it to DVD for playback in Blu-ray... no problem. If you want to actually do some editing so that viewers don't have to sit through the entire 2 hours it took to capture your kids first steps, well that's another issue. As it turns out the AVCHD format is just starting to make it's way into video editing suites, and many of the very popular ones (e.g. Adobe Premiere Elements) doesn't yet support it. And when you finally do find software to support it, the format is extremely alogorithm heavy which means you better have pretty high end PC with bucket loads of memory sitting around, and even then expect to leave your video processing over night.

As it turned out I had just recently purchased the latest version of Nero 8 Ultra Edition which actually does support AVCHD. The only problem is when I make the AVCHD format video and try and transfer it back to the camcorder, the transfer program crashes. Not a good start. So I have to make it in MPEG 2 and use the camcorder software (which not surprisingly is borderline useless) to convert it to AVCHD and then transfer back to the camcorder. Of course I have to transfer it back to the camcorder because as of yet I have nothing else connected to my TV capable of viewing HD videos I've created (my only other HD device is the cable box).

OK now it may sound like I'm complaining about the camera and I'm not, I'm only complaining about the format and I suspect some of these issues will be fixed over time. The camera is actually great and does have excellent reviews. The ONLY real complaint I have about the camera is the jerkiness of video in 24 fps mode (1080p). You can find a great review and explanation of the issue here.

So, bottom line, would I recommend this camera? Yes and no. Yes if you don't mind beeing bleeding edge and have patience for the software to catch up. Otherwise, go get a HDV camera (the Canon HV20 is highly rated) and you'll probably be off to a quicker start.