Noob sayin hey
 

Just bought a Canon Vixia HF-200 and it shoots beautifully. I gotta beef with the PIXELA software which completely overwhelms my 1 year old Dell M1530 XPS laptop that has a fast processor and 4 GB RAM. I got issues with proprietary software in general (hate apple products). A number of people have mentioned Adobe Premier Elements for video editing and I guess MS Movie Maker is out. My questions are these: if I buy the Adobe SW, can I delete Pixela? Can I d/l clips directly via window? And, will the Adobe SW stress my system less than the Pixela? Thanks for the info. This is a great forum and I look forward to learning more about my new camcorder.

Welcome Ted !

The Pixella software is very limited and unlikely to be adequate for any serious editing. The good news is that the video files can be easily downloaded directly from the camcorder's SD card into the computer and can be used without Pixella whatsoever. They are in the STREAM folder in the file format with the extension .MTS and are numbered sequentially starting at 00000.MTS, 00001.MTS, etc.

Your laptop is adequate but not optimal for AVCHD editing. You might try downloading the free trial versions of a few video editing programs to see which one you like and which run well on your hardware. The best of them are Cyberlink Power Director 8 Ultimate and Corel Video Studio Pro X2, in my opinion, but your opinion may very well differ. Adobe Premiere Elements runs poorly on my hardware, despite being superfast high-end Intel Extreme Quadcore. Sony also has some very nice products including Vegas Movie Studio Platinum and Vegas 9.

Good luck and welcome once again!

Larry

thanks Larry
 

thats some good information - I was hoping to avoid spending a bundle on software but the prices aren't too bad. I also have a quad core desktop but I was hoping to use the laptop for editing. I am glad that the mts files are usable by other programs. That gives me hope.