Any Panasonic V770 users here?

[Batchman]

Hi, all!

Well, 7 months ago, I finally bought my first video camera ... only took me 30 years from when I first wanted one, to getting it.

And tonight, I took it out and used it for the first time.

And now I've got some questions.

I'm very happy with much of what I see. The video quality seems quite decent. The audio seems quite satisfactory for what it is (filming in a restaurant, I knew there would be some background noise, but the performers are quite easy to hear, and the sound actually seems better than it did in the restaurant ... possibly because I can turn the volume up at home while listening to it.)

It's going to take me a few times of using this to really get to know what I am doing with it ... but ... what kind of settings should I be choosing on this?

When I look at my video through the camera, it says there is one file, and it's over an hour long. When I hook up the camera to the computer so I can copy the file over to the computer, it shows two files. The first one is about 4gb long, and contains about the first 40 minutes of the file, and then during the last 5 minutes (of that partial file) it says it can't play anymore.

The second file starts about five minutes later, and goes on for the last 20 minutes of the recording, and seems perfectly fine.

But when I play it back on the camera, the one file plays all the way through, appx 65 minutes, with no missing sections, no glitches, nothing untoward. BTW, I recorded this in AVCHD format.

So here's a couple of questions ... while the AVCHD stream files will play in Windows Media Center, as noted above, the last five minutes of the first file is not playable. And while my laptop may be able to play the AVCHD files, I know lots of other things can't, which may make it more difficult for me to share these in the future.

Is there an easy way to convert these over, or should I switch to one of the .mp4 recording formats and just avoid the issue all together? I guess what I am asking is, is there a good reason to stay with the AVCHD format that makes it worth having to find a way to convert things over?

Anyway, as I say, I am quite pleased with the camera overall, just need to figure out how to get this (these) file(s) over to my computer in one piece and usable.

Help? Comments? Suggestions? "Shut up, you moron"s?

[TreeTops]

Here's a guess. Your video camera saves files to a SD Card. That SD card was formatted fat32. Fat32 has a 4GB limit for files. Your camera stopped recording at 4GB and then restarted to continue recording. That stopping caused a problem for the last part of the first recording. Check your camera specs and see if you can format that card to exFAT. If so your problem may be solved for your next gig.