[Macworld]

Post your comments for Canon rolls out three new HD camcorders here

[leicaman]

What I want to know about these hard drive video cameras is, where are you going to store your 32 gig movies? And if there is compression going on as it stores the videos on the drives, is it lossless?

[kingrhoton]

These are all AVCHD cameras, so yes, the video is compressed lossily. Only professional videocameras (or the HDMI port) will give you lossless, uncompressed video, and you better have a good drive system to be able catch that huge data rate. Most single hard drives can only capture at most a single uncompressed video stream, and that's currently far beyond any SDHC's capability.

[flybynight]

You're going to put them on your hard drive, edit them down to something watchable, then export your finished product to H.264 and watch them on your AppleTV!
Or wait for Blu-Ray support...

[tallscot]

> You're going to put them on your hard drive, edit them down to something watchable, then export your finished product to H.264 and watch them on your AppleTV!
[/quote]
No I'm not. I have no time to do all that. It takes hours just to import that damn thing as it encodes it in AIC, hours more to export in H.264.
Here's a thought –A why doesn't Apple support AVCHD so I can just transfer the movies over much like I transfer songs from my iPod?

[marti123]

So........will these work with iMovie HD, '08, or Final Cut?
I'm sure the answer isn't in the press release this article was generated from, but it's an answer that many of us here would like to know...
And yes, Apple, get off your buTT and do the right thing, exactly as tallscot suggests above!
For any other vid cam shoppers like myself, there are several good articles here and elsewhere about why you may have a lot of trouble doing the simple video projects iMovie became famous for with most of the current crop of HD camcorders. Seems that both the camcorder manufacturers and Apple are to blame. Canon's Vixia HF10 seems to be somewhat of an exception, but it's clear that Apple needs to do a lot more work before all our personal "digital hubs" can easily work as personal HD video hubs.

[Schneb]

Several times now I was glad I had an original DV tape to return to for a renewed edit version of some of my movies. Even if it is just my kids. A shot I thought I wouldn't want later, became precious and invaluable a few years later.
These cameras don't interest me. What I want is 3 sensor capture with HD Progressive at 60fps. Asking for the moon? Well, if they want my money, yes!

[Photonerd]

We'll have to keep our fingers crossed. I think both the existing Vixia and similar products from Sony are the only ones currently that are seamless plug-n-play with OS X. But in any case hopefully Canon is paying attention to Mac users here as they're an ever-growing part of their target demographic. The HG20 looks pretty sweet.

[tallscot]

>I think both the existing Vixia and similar products from Sony are the only ones currently that are seamless plug-n-play with OS X.

To me, "seamless" means I don't have to transcode on import. That's what DV is - native import, native export. All of the AVCHD camcorders require that you encode it into AIC codec while importing, a process that is around 2X the time of footage (twice as long as tape import), and then you have to encode it into the delivery codec, a process that can take up to 5:1 of your footage.

Ironically, it's not the Apple solution that is "seamless". If you have PVConnect and a supported media extender (lots, including PS3 and Xbox 360 but not Apple TV), you can stream your AVCHD movies natively in 1080i. So you can transfer your movies over to the Mac quickly and then watch them on your TV, no thanks to Apple.

[Steve_S]

Schneb said:

Several times now I was glad I had an original DV tape to return to for a renewed edit version of some of my movies. Even if it is just my kids. A shot I thought I wouldn't want later, became precious and invaluable a few years later.

Yeah, these hard drive based camcorders are pretty useless for anything but simple youtube like clips. I'm not sure how you would be able to do something like shoot a wedding with a 45min (or less) build in storage limitation.

As for the AVCHD to AIC conversion, there is an inconvenience and I agree that Apple should integrate native support, but it's not a show stopper for most. Though, it does provide an outlet for some to make a big deal about it. For me, it's not a big deal because editing is a hobby. However, if I did that for a living, I probably wouldn't be working with AVCHD in the first place.

[tallscot]

>I'm not sure how you would be able to do something like shoot a wedding with a 45min (or less) build in storage limitation.

I'm not sure what you are talking about there. At the LP mode, the 32 gig HF11 stores 12 hours 15 minutes. At the highest quality mode (MXP), it stores 2 hours 55 minutes.

The HG21 does over 45 hours in LP mode, 11 hours 5 minutes in MXP mode.

Since it supports SDHC memory cards, you can add an unlimited amount of recording time. A 16 gig card is around $50.

>Though, it does provide an outlet for some to make a big deal about it. For me, it's not a big deal because editing is a hobby.

Adding hours of time to do a simple edit is definitely a show stopper for me. No problem, I'll just transfer the AVCHD files over quickly and not edit them. It's just a hobby. OK, now what? How do I watch them? LOL!

Good thing there are 3rd party developers out there who have created native streaming of AVCHD for non-Apple media extenders.

If you want to edit your Disney trip without having to sit and wait hours as it imports, you can always fire up Windows on your Intel Mac. ;)

[Schneb]

tallscot said:

The HG21 does over 45 hours in LP mode

Yeah, I'm pretty sure he misread that description.

[ramblingman]

The prices for these toys, toys which are supposedly consumer-grade, seem a bit steep.
Does anyone have any idea if there's a useful system in place to backup video data to some storage medium so it can be accessed and edited at a later date? If so, how?

[ramblingman]

Another comment:
I note that the article doesn't discuss if these new camcorders are compatible with iMovie, Final Cut Express, or Final Cut Pro, etc.
Any clues?