Hitachi DZ-HV564E / Sanyo HD100
 

Hi
Thought I would post some experiences about editing footage from this Mpeg4 AVC machine. Trying to play this in Edius/ Premiere was very painful, if it played at all. It comes into Quicktime and will play if you have the hardware. I bought the camera knowing that is wasn't pro gear, and I suspect not designed to be anything more than attractive 'grab' footage, better than your phone etc... but it produces very clean (when the autofocus finishes searching) images and footage. I tried it skiing recently and with a ski pole and clamp produced very fluid moving clips. In fact I thought at one point it was doing 90fps!

Trying to edit however is very problematic. I first tried renaming MP4 to mov... then edius would see it (no audio).
Quicktime Pro then used to get audio exported from the clip and marry it back to the video on timeline... fine till it all got too much, after 25 clips on timeline, and made Edius fall over - a lot. So back to drawing board. Super and other free programs just remind me of the clunky codec that comes with camera, and gets in the way of Core AVC which I use with Cineform for other 'troublesome' H264/AVCHD/AVC codecs. So I have resigned myself to using Canopus Procoder/Express - to make HDV1 MPEG2 files 720p (runs at 0.30 realtime) - oh and it records 29.97... so there is another strange quirk, for a 'E' European version of this model. Looks like NTSC DVD's for me...
Hope this is of interest to anyone picking one of these cameras up - I think they are only £120 new... I got one from someone who obviously got frustrated with it not playing on anything but itself... I will happily hang it outside cars, in drumkits and even gaffer it to helmets etc... great once you can get the footage to work with your NLE
...and it does 1080P

....actually i forgot to mention that the audio is never and long as the video when re-encoding, so make sure you trim the clip at the end in whichever program you are using. 5 frames should do it, but I always do 1 second just to be sure. Otherwise is will come up with an error - or even refuse to start