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panasonic hdc-sd9

I just bought one of these this weekend, and I'm glad I looked here before using it. Has anyone had success with this camera out of the box, or is it a problem across the board? I'll take it back and get the Sony rather than bridging the camera and iMac with third-party software.
 
Panasonic SD9/iMovie

Hi,

I haven't had chance to go through all the pages to find out, but has anyone found out if there is an update to iMovie so the SD9 footage can be imported. I heard it was on the next updated.
 
Just a few observations I've made since acquiring 2 of these for use at our school. After initial excitement, I found that downloading and editing the footage from these is not as simple as it's made out. Visits to many forums etc confirmed these.

Anyway, here's what I've found out so far.
1. Don't mess around with converters etc - unless you want to spend hours waiting for a few minutes footage.
2. Get Final Cut instead. I'm currently using FC Express, but Pro is in the pipeline.
3. If you're taking footage from an external HDD (log and transfer), it won't initially recognise it. You need to save your files in the same folder structure as on the camera, but even then, you will need to click the little tab for 'add custom path' on the log and transfer screen. Then you need to direct FC to the right folder. For me, this was the one labelled BDMV. This took me ages to work out!
4. Get a big, big HDD. We made the initial move of recording circa 2 hours of footage of our school prom. Little did I (or indeed our IT guy) realise just how much space this takes - something like 10 times as much as the original file. This is somewhat stretching my poor little Mac Mini! Thankfully I have a big external HDD.

I'm sure this may be obvious to many here, but I want to share this with as many people as possible so they don't have to spend ages finding it out the hard way (like I did).
 
Thanks, James - all useful information there.

Just one question if I may.

Using FCE on your Mac Mini (what specs by the way?), how do you find the conversion time? (Okay - so that's two questions!) Slower than real time, no doubt, but in your experience how long does, say, 10 minutes' worth of AVCHD take to import?

Cheers,
Andrew.
 
It's a 1.83Ghz Intel with just 512MB memory with a 70GB HDD and Superdrive. Also running a 330GB external HDD.

Two years ago it was bought when I started running a Media qualification (BTEC for anyone interested).

Originally we got it for students to use with Imovie. Using it with FC has just been a recent experiment, as we've started putting together some school promotion videos - hence the newer cameras (which, typically, I had little say on - to be honest I would have chosen different, as my needs are different for teaching).

My plan (although whether my superiors agree is another thing) is to buy a newer machine to run FC on for bigger projects. I'm also going to be replacing my own (old) IMac later in the year, and intend to do some work on this.

Anyway, enough whingeing about the lack of funding for Secondary education in the UK...

How does it manage?

As a guide, it takes around 2.5*real time, e.g. 1 minute of footage will take 2.5 min to import.

Converting/exporting takes a while as well. Off hand I can't remember - I'll put up some info for anyone interested when I next do it.

Overall I would say it just about does OK. I've changed the frame rate on playback to avoid dropping frames, but I must say that otherwise, it is worth the effort.
 
I'm going to be buying this camcorder next week on payday- I thought all the iMovie '08 issues had been sorted? Can anyone confirm this for deffo?

It probably will be alright, just me being paranoid!!! :p

I've downloaded a lot of samples from the web for this camera and I'm really looking forward to getting it for all those family moments and such- it looks fantastic.
 
I'm at work so I didn't have time to read the couple of pages. Moral of the story: I have the SD9 and currently have no trouble importing/editing. Granted, I haven't tried hooking the camera directly into the computer using USB; I use a card reader (Expresscard slot). Importing into FCP and iMovie was nearly impossible until about a month or two ago. Now it works flawlessly. PS: I'm not sure it's required for this to work, but I do have Perian installed. Hope that helps.
 
question!

Ok, so I just got this camera. And surprise surprise, i can't directly open it in fcp....but i was able to open it in imovie using the usb cord. From imovie i could export it as a quicktime and then open it in fpc...but i dont know much about quictime...is exproting the footage as a quicktime ruin the quality??? Anyone who knows about this let me know!
Thanks!
 
What version of FCP are you using? You should be able to attach your SD9 by USB (or eject the card and use a USB card reader) and use the Log and Transfer function (CTRL-SHIFT-8).
 
Im using FCP 6.0. And ive tried the log and capture, but maybe im doing it wrong. Would you mind telling me the steps??? Thanks!
 
and does anyone know if exporting as a quicktime does anyting to the quality of the footage???
 
So does the HDC-SD0 now work fully with Macs or not ?

Still any issues with getting data from SD9 to the mac ?
 
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