Hello, Apple, HV20
 

I just pre ordered from B&H an HV20. I looked at the SD1 from Panasonic at best buy, the ergonomics were good and the zoom was very smooth compared to the HV10 I tried, but the problems of editing the footage and small ccd's swayed me to the HV20. I downloaded the canon sample footage in H.264.mov and burned to a DVD in iDVD, for me that was enough to convince me on my HDTV, the quality was great. I started making b videos way back in the early 80's and gave up because of the quality available for a small budget, now I just want to have some fun with this camera and the compatability with my iMac along with the great video will be a joy to work with. When I look at the video I previously had to work with compared to this it makes me cringe. So hello everyone!!!, and I hope I can aquire some knowledge here and add a little myself if possible.

Welcome!
 

Welcome! From my recent experience here, I would say you've come to the right place. Cheers!

Thanks Robert for the welcome, I am going to wait to sell my Sony DV TRV20 along with my filters and lenses etc until I see if I can use any of it with the HV20. I am going back to Russia for the 6th time in September and can't wait to shoot some footage there. I work on a mac with video, but I take a PC laptop on my trips, I wonder is there any free software that will allow me to import the HD footage to the Sony Vaio laptop just for viewing? I have premier LE on it but I dont think its HD ready. I will check if they have an update. But then its Russia, so I guess I can find the software I need easy enough.

I'm looking at the HV20 as well. In the next couple of years I'm going to add a Macbook and 24" iMac to my arsenal. I'll do my editing on the 24" with FCS and Logic Pro.

The Macbook and Mac mini of mine will be for general computing. I'm so glad Canon has delivered the HV20. I see it being a very popular camera for this year and they addressed many of the weaknesses of the 1st generation HDV consumer cam.

Now you look at the power of today's computers and you see how delivering edited HD content is possible. I'm even going to have a HD DVD player that I can use to view my HD content. I won't even need a HD DVD burner because I can burn HD DVD content to a standard DVD disc and get about an hour of solid video on one DL disc.

Things have changed ..for the better.

What are you using to get an hour worth of video (or rather how much compression) ? All the talk I've heard is about 20 minutes of HD on a standard DVD disc..

-Steve

For viewing the tape/camera output (not capturing files), saw a great tip on the forum- use Videolan's (free) VLC player. Plug in the camcorder via firewire, start up VLC, select Capture from file menu and the HDV device, and hit play on the camcorder- voila, instant live HD video onscreen. You can set the deinterlace options as well. VLC is also great for playing back captured files as well (much smoother playback than windows MediaPlayer.)

for free capture, not sure what's available... heard capDVHS might work... Sony cams can use the HDVsplit program, but it didn't work for me for the Canon, it split files arbitrarily rather than by scene.