Canon HF10 putting video back on the card?
 

Is that possible?

What I mean is I want to take video with my HF10, use my pinnacle to add pics and music then put it on a format to play back for friends and family that have lcd's but no Blu Ray players. If I put it back on the card I can pop it back into the cam and pay it back in gorgeous HD on friends and family's lcd's.

I took a 10 sec video and used pinnacle and tried exporting to avi, mpeg2, mpeg4, wmv and put all of them back on the card but the cam didnt see the files.

Any suggestions anyone? I dont see mts as an option in pinnacle to export to.

I could just burn to regular dvd but thats LAME I wanna play it back in stunning HD BABY!!!!

Paul,

This is a tricky topic, and one which you are unlikely to find elsewhere on the Internet. Believe me, I looked all over to find a way to do this.

The good news is that it can be done.

It took my plenty of time and experimentation with 8 different programs which provide AVCHD editing and authoring both on the PC and the Mac, and only 1 program I have found has been able to do this. Not even this program advertizes this as a feature, and to my knowledge, no software on the market can do this other than Nero 8 Ultimate or possibly the newest version Nero 9.

The process takes a little work. You edit the AVCHD clip(s) into a new AVCHD disk but do not create any disk menus. You then take the AVCHD folder which has been written to your hard disk and write it back to an already formatted SD card which has the camera-created folder structure, replacing only the AVCHD folder on the camera's card with the new folder you have just created by editing.

The camcorder can then be used as a playback AVCHD player to show your AVHCD content anywhere you desire.

Incidentally, several programs provide this type of function (Write to Tape) for HDV content, but none provide it for AVCHD.

It is entirely possible that other brands of AVCHD camcorders (Sony, JVC) will not work at all. It is also entirely possible that the newest version of Nero, version 9, may not work either.

I can only state / confirm that it works for Nero 8 Ultimate and the HF100, for which I have done it many times.

Hope this is of some use to you and possibly others,

Larry

Paul,

There is an inexpensive hardware solution. Western Digital's recently released media player, WD TV. This is a small box with remote, 2 USB inputs, HDMI output (and composite output for TVs that don't have HD and HDMI).

You supply the USB storage device (external hard drive or thumb drives) and necessary cables. In Pinnacle when editing is done go to Make Movie and render to one of the WMV HD formats. 1280x720p at 60fps looks terrific and 1920x1080 looks just about like the original files played from the camera. But I need to warn you, 1920x1080 may take an awful long time to render. On my quad core Q6600 it took a 26 minute project shot with my HF100 about 12 hours to render.

But, DANG!, it looks good, and I'm playing it off a thumb drive.

I paid $129.99 for mine at Best Buy, last I saw they had come down to $99.99.

Iomega just came out with a similar box priced at $79 or so. But I know the WD TV works and works very well.

I've been watching media players for a while, many come with internal hard drive or require you to install your own internal hard drive, and none supported WMV HD. I wanted just a simple box that would take input from my sources and put it out over HDMI to the TV.

And danged if WD didn't come out with just what I've been looking for. Simple and small enough to pack in a small camera bag and take over to a friends house. Simply have them unhook their HDMI cable from their DVD and let you plug it into the WD TV HDMI out. Voila! Your HD video playing...

8GB thumb drives are ideal, and getting cheap too

Bruce,
Some of my buddies over at SimplyDV.com in the UK have tried out the WD device and say it's the cat's whiskers - so much so that I've got one all wrapped up and waiting to be opened on Christmas Day! (-and I can't get to it before then...)
It is just the solution I've been waiting for. In the past, I've had to transfer edited items shot on my HF10 onto my FX1 and play it out on my HDTV - which wastes a lot of time and degrades the original 1980 x 1080 material.
...only 10 days and counting :-)

You just MADE MY DAY!!!!!!!

SWEET!!!!


THANKS BRUCE AND LARRY!!!!!!!

Merry Christmas, Paul

And to everyone else here, too.

You will enjoy it. I've only got 2 HDMI inputs on my TV, one is taken up by the satellite reciever (finally had them convert mine to HDV...Nat Geographic is SPECTACULAR in HD) and the other my DVD player. So I had to get a combination switch/splitter, an HDMI "Y" connection that has an internal detection of which HDMI device is "hot". And it works, I've got my DVD player and the WD TV both on that switch and whichever one is powered up is detected and it's output goes to HDMI2 on the TV.

But I'd switch cables by hand if I had to...