video question

[nmwapiti]

just got my 1st video camera. Canon HFM 40. I have a PC with Vista and windows movie maker. Windows does not recognize the video format. What is my best option? video converter software or editing software that will recognize what the camera shoots?? Any suggestions???

 

[c3]

Vista does not have a native codec for playing or editing AVCHD clips from your new camera. That wasn't included until Windows7.

Try the Mirillis Splash Lite player here:

http://mirillis.com/en/downloads/downloads_splash.html

I've found it to be the best player for your Canon's AVCHD video on computers that are not capible of decoding the data rate of these cams fast enough to keep up. You may need to go to "settings" "video" and uncheck hardware acceleration if your video card is not up to the task.

I use Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 10 or the newer vs. 11 to do editing (about $125). All video editing software these days have a very steep learning curve and expect to be incredibly frustrated at first. Once you get the hang of it though and if you have the patience to wait overnight for it to render out your edited video, you will get incredible results to upload to Youtube or put on a Blu-Ray disk (requires another $150 Blu-Ray burner).

To really go for this whole video editing thing you'll probably need a new computer with at least a Core i7 920 processor and at least 8 gigs of ram. Add a couple of spare 1T drives and you'll be good to go for a couple of years

Cheers,
Pete

 

[Cornhusker]

I feel smarter just reading that post.