I am going to be using video that was shot from a consumer HD hard disk camera and has now been uploaded unto a friend's PC. Before burning onto a DVD to give to me for editing, What format should it be saved in?

This video will be edited into FCE.

Avi? I have only used my camera and a DV tape. Please, any suggestions?

Are we talking HDV or SD video? Are you planning to burn the clips as data or encode it as a MPEG2?

Depending on your version of FCE it is designed to work with standard def, HDV and (latest version) AVCHD. Standard def should really be in Quicktime files though you can use Flip 4 Mac to do the conversion from AVI later on on your Mac

If you are transferring raw video files to a disc, you are going to burn up a lot of discs. If you can put the files to DV tape and have a cam to import to FCE ...

Encoding the video as an MPEG2 DVD is a weak solution. This will only have to be converted later with some third party software and the results may not be satisfactory

If the HD cam records to the AVCHD format and you have the latest version of FCE, best solution is to just borrow the cam and import direct to FCE

Thanks for the reply.
The video is no longer on the cam. Is there a way I can put the video on my dv cam, even if it is HDV?

You could encode to DV-NTSC and then burn to data DVD. That would be fine and FCE will edit it.

Noah