HD Camcorders for editing?

Question

I am really into making movies. I am looking at camcorders from panasonic and sony for under or around 1000 dollars. Does anyone know of an editing software that can capture my HD videos in uncompressed format from a USB 2.0 as most all of the cameras have them. what about any camcorders with firewire? Is there any editing software that can capture HD video as uncompressed from firewire?

Answer 1

Using any miniDV tape based camcorder... like Canon HV20, HV30, Sony HDR-HC1, HC3, HC5, HC7, HC9 and connecting with Firewire (IEEE1394a, i.Link) works fine.

I use iMovieHD and FinalCut Pro with my Sony HDR-HC1 and HDR-FX1 all the time... with my Macs. When the video is imported, it is decompressed... 44 gig of hard drive space is consumed per hour of imported HDV format video from miniDV tape based camcorders.

For the Windows environment, Sony Vegas and Adobe Premiere are the usual suspects.

+++++++

If you are in the internal hard drive (HDD) or flash memory high definition video environment, typically, high definition is store are very compressed AVCHD files and copied to the computer's hard drive as that highly compressed file. Be very careful as some video editors cannot handle all manufacturer's AVCHD implementations.

Answer 2

You need to do a little more research to understand what you are asking.  There are no HD cameras under $1,000.  You are talking about HDV cameras.  The difference is that HDV uses very heavy MPEG compression to fit an image with HD proportions into the 25mbps (mega-bits per second) bandwidth of the consumer DV standard.

Knowing that, you'll understand that there's no such thing as capturing uncompressed video from one of these cameras.  It's compressed when it hits the tape.

Any modern computer with a current editing system can import that video without additional compression over Firewire.  USB isn't robust enough, even version 2.0.