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fos
06-17-2010, 11:38 AM
I recently purchased a Sony HDR CX550V HD Camcorder with 64 Gb of flash memory for storage. It is an excellent camera that has many features that I needed in a camera: low light capability, exceptional image stabilization, a wide angle lens, and solid state video storage. After a significant amount of use, it has proved to be everything I was looking for in a video camera.

While I have both Windows and Apple computers, I prefer to use my iMac for video editing due to its specifications and speed. I am currently on a trip to Florida with only a laptop computer. After taking quite a bit of video, I decided to transfer it to my MacBook Pro and then use either iMovie or Final Cut Express for editing.

When I selected the download procedure in iMovie, only one video clip was available. I knew and verified that hundreds of clips were stored in the camera's digital memory. The camera manual state that you can only download media in the format that the camera is currently set to. I verified and ultimately tried every setting possible. Still, only the one one clip was visible and available for download.

I searched the internet for a solution. Since this is a new model and uses the AVCHD compression code to store its files, there was a fair amount of information but none that directly related to my problem. I finally found a footnote on a Sony support page that gave me the solution. The camcorder can record at several different "quality" settings within both high definition (HD) and standard definition (SD). For my purposes, HD HQ provides a good balance between video quality and file storage size. All of my filming has been in HD HQ. However, I had made one brief shot at a club meeting in SD. It turns out that the version of iMovie that I have will ONLY see the SD quality images on the camera whenever any SD images are present.

The solution was to simply delete the SD image from the camera. After that, all of the other HD images were available for download.

Jeff

bluesdog
06-21-2010, 12:50 AM
Nice camera!

I wonder how well linux-based systems would handle editing video?

There's Cinelerra, but it has rather a clunky interface, imo.
Kdenlive is looking pretty good, and seems fairly stable.

Last time I tried kdenlive with a couple of small avi clips, it just kept crashing, but lately KDE 4.4.4 has become very steady, and all the apps work surprisingly well

I'll have to grab some movie clips and give it a go...

danieldk
06-21-2010, 11:52 AM
There's alo PiTiVi:
http://www.pitivi.org/

Though, I never tried it...

fos
06-21-2010, 01:50 PM
Thanks for the tips.

pitivi.org looks pretty good. Anything in - anything out....

I'll give it a try and report back.

Jeff

stafio
06-22-2010, 11:45 PM
I have used Avidemux (http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/) to edit some video recorded from a VHS and turn it into a DVD. It worked well with handling large files, applying filters to clean up the video, and do some cropping. I recommend giving it a try.

fos
06-23-2010, 08:24 AM
I see that Avidemux is cross platform, too. I'll give it a try. It is the new AVCHD format that causes most of the problem. If it supports that, great.

Thanks