I'm looking into buying a new hard drive camcorder

[pine99]

I'm looking into buying a new hard drive camcorder and like the Sony HDR-SR1 DIGITAL 30GB HDD. Here's the question I use Adobe Premere Elements 3 and I like to edit all my videos, can I edit the video from this camcorder or do I have to do a bunch of converting? If this HD camcorder isn't going to work which one would you suggest?

[redwudz]

Unfortunately, most of the consumer hard drive camcorders record to MPEG-2 mode, not the easiest to edit, but faster to convert to DVDs. And you are stuck with whatever quality they are set to. I prefer the DV camcorders as DV is very easy to edit, though you need to convert it to MPEG-2 format with your computer, which can take some time.

If your Adobe program can edit MPEG-2, then a hard drive camcorder may be a suitable option.

And pine99, in the future please use a topic title that relates to your actual topic, to make it easier for members to search for similar topics. Our rules:

Try to choose a subject that describes your topic.
Please do not use topic subjects like Help me!!! or Problems.

I will change yours this time.

Moderator redwudz

And welcome to our forums.

[edDV]

Current hard drive camcorders use either SD MPeg2 or AVCHD (MPeg4) formats.

These will be more difficult to edit. Try it yourself in Elements before buying. AVCHD will be especially difficult to edit with current software.

DV and HDV camcorders can add a hard drive as an external option connected over IEEE-1394. See Firestore FS4.