Newbie who hates his 10 day old HD Canon, please help
 

Hello, nice to meet you all.

Please could you help me with my new HD Canon camcorder, it's a Legria HF200, bought as a xmas gift and I'm tired of it already, which is a shame.

I'm sure its me and my equipment, so as to speak.

Nothing plays smoothly or without jitters when transferred to the pc. I have a hp 6910p laptop running vista business with 2gb RAM.

It plays fine on the camcorder 2" lcd, but not on the laptop via Imagemixer/player (Canons provided software). It also doesn't play in the VLC media player, that's just sound track with a frozen image.

I can't believe that the camcorder has more processing power than the pc??!!

Transferred a test to youtube, it recognises HQ (HD) but jars from one frame to another.

Is it the laptop's video card, not enough ram, Imagemixer, VLC, all of the above? What I dont want to do is spend £120 on RAM, then £? on upgrading the video card (not sure I could anyway) and then have to go and buy a £? PC with masses of RAM and a better video card after.

I was hoping for a HiDef extravaganza, all I got was a jittery set of stills.... gutted.

Thanks for looking, reading and hopefully, helping.

What about playback on an HDTV... via either HDMI or the component video cable, is that working well for you?

Bless Canon, it didn't come with mini-hdmi (as not advertised!) so I have to order one.

hmm, forgot about component, back in a minute...

AVC does require a lot of horse power. Any anti-virus stuff or other background programs will eat into that power too.

Component is fine, no lag at all.

I'm using a Class 6, 8GB SD Card if that helps for info.

I closed all programs but not the AV, running Kaspersky which I thought was less impactful than say Norton or McAfee. Will try that too.

I googled yr laptop: you got a 2Ghz duo? Probably not enough juice. 5400rpm drive could be a problem too if it is fairly full/fragmented.

Yep Duo and a full HDrive!

Intel or AMD, Quad or?

What should I look for in new pc please? I dont want to have to buy twice in 2 years AGAIN! The wife will go mad.

Great help thus far btw.

yep, there's your problem... not going to get acceptable playback on that laptop...

Generally for AVCHD a quad core is regarded as a minimum, though most currently available machines should have enough oomph to play back OK - things improve across the tech spectrum, and add up to better performance - my laptop which I can manage to edit on has a 5400 RPM drive, and seems fine and dandy compared to 2-3 year old 7200 RPM desktop drives.

If you're going to be doing heavy editing, that's another set of specs, and will depend a lot on how patient you are...

I have a similar laptop with 2GHz Core2Duo, and it plays AVCHD recordings from my Canon HF100 just fine. Most of my recordings are at the XP+ quality though (12 Mbps). Higher bit rates, i.e. FXP and MXP modes, presumably consume more CPU during playback.

I suggest trying Splash player:
Splash - Next Generation Player

In my experience, Splash gives better visual quality and uses less CPU than ImageMixer or VLC.

Its about time somone said that ^ its probably that big bad $24 dedicated processing chip in the camera using 7watts of power, which when put into a Pci-E board to help the computer will only costs $1500 for the computer, using 140watts of power.
makes complete sence, untill it is a specific Hardware BOX for the manufactures camera/codec costing $5000 and requires 140watts just for the external box.

My Core2 2GHz laptop struggles with AVCHD from my Canon HF10.

If your main need is playback, put your clips on a USB flash drive and play them back on your TV via an HD mediaplayer ($100-$150 - this is the model I use: 1080P EGreat M34A Network MediaPlayer H.264HDMI1.3 NY23 - eBay (item 280447181800 end time Jan-12-10 03:00:00 PST) )

Record at a lessor bitrate and try that. VLC will play 16mbps AVCHD with some stutter on my system and I have a quad core. But my Sony software can play it at full bitrate.

If I record at 9mbps, it still looks just fine and VLC will play it back fine.

Before doing anything else, I'd try installing a trial of CoreAVC: CoreAVC 2.0 (for Windows) | CoreCodec (if memory serves there's one on their site somewhere).

It's a highly efficient software CODEC and can often enable AVC files to play on hardware that would usually struggle. If it doesn't help, you haven't lost anything.

Editing AVCHD (which is where you are heading one way or another) will require the most computer horsepower you can make yourself afford.

With some hardware prices coming down a bit, look into the Core i7 based machines. Core i7 is a quad core processor that multithreads, Windows Task Manager when you click on the Performance tab shows 8 virtual cores happily at work.

Some software can take advantage of multithreading and some can't. Staying on the low cost software end of things I use Pinnacle Studio which is a computer resource HONGRY beast and requires a quad core processor running at a minimum 2.66Ghz clock speed to edit 1920x1080 17Mbps AVCHD. But Pinnacle was one of the first to come out with AVCHD native editing that really worked.

Sony Vegas, on the other hand will supposedly edit AVCHD on a fast dual core machine.

But if you don't want to be buying again in the next year or two, go with a Core i7 based machine.