Capture to PC from HV20
 

Ok, so I am just being such a noob right now. What methods would you all recommend using in getting the video from the HV20 to my PC. The current programs that I have in PC right now are PP2.0 and Sony Vegas 7 Trial, I am just all confused with Vegas 7. It looks simple but I am so used to using PP2.0 that its making really hard for me to understand Vegas. Is there a way to import the video that capture using Vegas into PP2.0?
Keep in mind that I just got my first HD camera friday.
Any help would be apprecaited, thanks again.

Sony Vegas (Movie Studio at least) captures HDV as .m2t, but it won't detect HDV scenes. You can download for free and use HDVSplit to capture the tape and then use any editor you want (although you will have to edit out some black frames out of each clip that HDVSplit stupidly adds).

I use Premiere Pro 2.0 since I've got my HV20 and I have no problems editing HDV footage (I have a AMD X2 3800+ Dual Core, by the way, and I didn't even notice a significant performance gain after recently upgrading my computer from 1 to 2 GB RAM). The only 'glitch' I noticed (might still be my system) is that if I capture long clips directly in Premiere, the audio runs terribly out of sync. So I'd recommend, as Eugenia, using HDVSplit to capture your videos. Strange though, I didn't even notice the black frames added by HDVSplit - maybe because I always shoot a few seconds for 'safety' at the end of a scene.

Yeah, if you always trim clips you won't notice it...

So i capture with HdSplit straight from the camera? That seems all too easy, off i go to try it.

BTW, Vegas Movie Studio 8 Platinum was released *yesterday* (I just found out). If you buy that instead of version 7, you will get better support for capturing and scene detection. I only find its preview playback very slow, other than that it's very capable. So, if HDVSplit doesn't do it for you, buy the new version of VMS, it sells for $130.

Cool, thanks for update Eugenia...
does VMS8 platinum now support scene detection on HDV, or not? It doesn't seem to say so yet in the features or release notes:
http://sony-169.vo.llnwd.net/dspcdn/...80a_readme.htm
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/...=447&PageID=86

It mentions better support for HDV / M2T and AVCHD, esp longer projects, but not much else...

is VMS also still limited to fixed MPG bitrate for DVD MPEG rendering?

I have 7.0e and it supported scene detection on my FX7 but not my HV10...

Just to let you guys know :)

Yes, the VMS8-Platinum supports HDV scene detection now.

Hmm, I seemed to recall the trial 7.0e did scene-detection-split/capture OK from my HV10... but it was a while ago.. or were you talking Studio? I only downloaded the trial for full Vegas.