At risk of opening up a huge can of worms,
I'm new to digital video, and am VERY confused about different video formats.
I bought a Panasonic camcorder with a hard drive to record footage of firework displays (which I make for a living), thinking - naively - "hard drive: so i can just drag the video files onto an external hard drive, no bother."
Not that simple, is it?
I use an Intel MacBook, but it is networked in the office to a bunch of PC's and the storage disc is attached to one of them, so I am open to solutions that work on either my mac or on a PC.
What I want is:
1) to save the video files onto a hard drive, in a format I can view (on MAc or PC), with minimum loss, minimum conversion time. Don't know what would be the best format, or what software to use for the conversion.
2) I need these to be easily editable with simple software (eg iMovie)
3) I need to be able to convert them to various formats:
- to burn to DVD
- to convert to smallish FLV files to upload to my website
- to convert to quicktimes or similar and keep on my macbook internal drive for showing to clients.
There are so many different video formats, and so many bits of software out there that I really dont know where to start.
The camera came with something called HD Writer, which works on PCs but seems to either burn straight from AVCHD to dvd or converts to another weird, unviewable format.
Budget: little or nothing.
Don't want much, do I?
Please help!
I'm new to digital video, and am VERY confused about different video formats.
I bought a Panasonic camcorder with a hard drive to record footage of firework displays (which I make for a living), thinking - naively - "hard drive: so i can just drag the video files onto an external hard drive, no bother."
Not that simple, is it?
I use an Intel MacBook, but it is networked in the office to a bunch of PC's and the storage disc is attached to one of them, so I am open to solutions that work on either my mac or on a PC.
What I want is:
1) to save the video files onto a hard drive, in a format I can view (on MAc or PC), with minimum loss, minimum conversion time. Don't know what would be the best format, or what software to use for the conversion.
2) I need these to be easily editable with simple software (eg iMovie)
3) I need to be able to convert them to various formats:
- to burn to DVD
- to convert to smallish FLV files to upload to my website
- to convert to quicktimes or similar and keep on my macbook internal drive for showing to clients.
There are so many different video formats, and so many bits of software out there that I really dont know where to start.
The camera came with something called HD Writer, which works on PCs but seems to either burn straight from AVCHD to dvd or converts to another weird, unviewable format.
Budget: little or nothing.
Don't want much, do I?
Please help!
