Handling home made HD recordings

[ngc7088]

Hello,
I don't even know where to start this topic. I just got my first HD camcoder, Canon vixia hf 21. It came with Pixela IMG mixer whatever software. It is not compatible with my Windows 7, 64 bit system. I contacted pixela, they are not ready with solution yet. Contacted Canon, they don't care because they never advertised compatibility with 64 bit or Windows 7 (true) advised me to wait for pixela upgrade or buy software (Adobe premium whatever-$700 bucks!!!).

The thing is I'm momentarily forced to explore some editing solutions. My aim for now is to be able to edit the home movies and convert them to DVD format to give away to family members whom are still a long way away from switching to blu ray. For myself and immediate family I'm planning the switch sooner but not yet, so I would like to also have (home made) blu ray format output which I am aware has limitations compared to commercial blu ray disks, but is still better than satellite tv hd signals. I do not care about youtube,facebook,twitter,or any form of publishing anything. Although conversion to ipod and/or blackberry might be interesting to me at some point.

Obviously budget is another limiting factor ( I cannot even afford this camera, it was a birthday gift from my mother in law if you can believe that!). So I'm exploring solutions as free as possible.

The advise I would like to get here (I am a newbie, and need newbie advise) is what is the most quality preserving approach to author HD home movies freely.

The way it looks from what I've looking around is that I'm going to have to convert the MTS recordings into some format which can then be edited with something like windows live movie maker (free) and then convert back the finished product to DVD (VIDEO_TS, IFO's VOB's and BUP's) for making dvd or m2ts for blu ray. It looks to me that I stand to loose a lot of quality in this process.

This camera records everything in 60i. It claims to have 30 and 24 p but those are emulations and everything is ultimately recorded in 60i. I hear that's not too good, as it should be progressive? So I have to deinterlace everything? Is it best to de interlace at the begining conversion or at the last one?

Or is there any way to edit everything as high quality as possible and then convert at the very end of the process?

What CODECS and GUI's should I be looking at?

What is avisynth and can it help me?
What is BLENDER and can it help me?

[Soopafresh]

Sounds like you're quite the beginner, as all of us were at one time. I'm going to give you the most basic and easiest methods to play and edit your footage. I'll try to keep the price down but also suggest the easiest pieces of software to use, so you'll only have to spend ~$55 on software to get going. Don't worry about Avisynth, 24p/60i or any of that stuff at the moment. You'll be too overwhelmed. Start with the basic building blocks and get fancy as you get more experienced.

Good thing you have a new computer, you'll need some serious horsepower to edit AVCHD MTS or M2TS files.

Save yourself some grief for now and forget DVD/Blu Ray creation. Doing so will save you many steps and you've already got so much to learn as it is. For the time being, just create high quality videos that you can put on Vimeo.com and then send the links to your family members. You can even password protect your videos so only those to whom you've given out the password can see them. If you wish to watch your footage at home on an HDTV, drop $100 and get a WD TV Live media player or similar. This will give you 1920x1080 and allow you to play your footage from a USB thumb drive rather than having to buy and burn to a Blu Ray device.


Buy a copy of CoreAVC h264/AVCHD codec ($13) which will let you play your MTS files very easily on your computer and will also make it so many editing packages can import your footage.

For simplicity and the fastest way to be productive, Vegas_HD is a $40 piece of software and will do the job for basic editing. The cool thing about Sony_Vegas_HD is that there are lots of hand holding tutorials built into the app. This feature pays for the app alone.

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/moviestudiohd (watch the video on that page. It's towards the bottom left).

And there are many videos available to instruct you on how to use your camcorder.

Start by making the sound on your camera better. There's little that's more annoying than microphone noise.


And the secret to making good videos is to stabilize the footage by shooting with a tripod or similar. Trust me on this. You'll quickly separate yourself from the crowd by using a stabilizer. You can start with a Gorillapod, it's very versatile.

[greymalkin]

sweeeet..about the wind screen for the camcorder! I was wondering if anyone made something like that...I'll definitely haveto check it out..although it makes your camcorder look kinda creepy :P.

[ngc7088]

OK, I'm using the trial version for now. It is still overwhelming. And It seems I'm also going to need "Architect" something?
I'm not pleased with the result so far. I'll get to vimeo soon and see if I can explain why.For now I was expecting I could create a menu for different scene among other things, also a lot of the issues probably have to do with my inexperience handling the camera itself and lack of tripod.

[ACHILEE5]

Hi
You could give ConvertXtoDVD 4 a try! It lets you try before you buy, so it's all good