Video Encoding Software for HD Camcorder?

[ncage]

Guys i just bought a new Canon HG21 HD AVCHD camcorder. I am going on a big vacation here in about 2 weeks. I need some good video encoding software. Id like to eventually use adobe premiere + After effects but i don't have the time to learn the software before i leave. Anyone have a lot of experience with this type of thing. I'm wanting something that is at least somewhat flexible, powerful and yet won't be that hard to learn. I've heard Sony Vegas stuff is pretty powerful...but is it going to be nearly as hard to use as premiere? I actually thing the newest version of windows live movie maker isn't that bad but it has a definite limitation in only being able to encode to the WMV format. Here is the list i've come up with so far:
1) Pinnacle
2) Corel VideoStudio X2
3) Sony Vegas

What you recommend?

Also, is there any good forum site that caters to this type of info? I have looked but all the forums ive found have sucked so far. You have a crap load of sites for digital photography like dpreview but non for video that i could find. Any help would be appreciated.

thanks,
Ncage

 

[Fardringle]

Are you looking for specific video editing features that are not available in the ImageMixer 3SE software that comes with the camera?

 

[ncage]

Originally posted by: Fardringle
Are you looking for specific video editing features that are not available in the ImageMixer 3SE software that comes with the camera?

Unfortunately i can't really answer your question right now because of experience level. I just got the camera yesterday. I have heard the software that comes with it sucks but i'm such a newbie at this stuff that i wouldn't really know. I have seen some cool effects that were done with pinnacle software on youtube where they had a like a picture album at the beginning and one of the pics faded into a video which was a really cool effect. I have heard some people say the pinnacle software is crash prone though. I really think this is something i'm really going to get into though. I'm about to go on vacation of a lifetime though. Maybe i should just dump all the video from the camcorder to a Hard Drive and not even working about encoding it until i return. The camcorder itself has got a ton of space at 120GB. I could maybe bring my external 1TB drive with me. I don't know. What do you thinK?

 

[Ken g6]

Originally posted by: ncage
I'm about to go on vacation of a lifetime though. Maybe i should just dump all the video from the camcorder to a Hard Drive and not even working about encoding it until i return.

Absolutely! That's what the pros do: get a ton of footage, then mix and match it in the cutting room.

I would definitely suggest you not worry about encoding it during the vacation!

(Unless the camera records in M-JPEG format, in which case if you were running out of space you might try converting to HuffYUV with VirtualDub. But only if you were running out of space, and it's not very likely your camera uses that.)

 

[theprodigalrebel]

Download the 30-day trial for Sony Vegas Movie Studio. While my experience level isn't sufficient to properly critique 'Vegas vs Premiere vs the rest', I've found Vegas to be fairly intuitive, easy to run and easy to grasp. I gave Premiere a trial run but I'm note entirely sure if the software wasn't intuitive or if I didn't try hard enough. Vegas IMO is definitely worth giving a shot first. Not too large a download either (<150MB IIRC).

 

[ncage]

Thanks Guys for the help. Like Ken suggested i think i'm going to wait until i get home to make this decision. At first i was going to install it on my notebook and try to encode them real time. Probably not use doing this at all. Instead i will just dump it to an external drive and not mess with it until i get home. Then i will have plenty of time to make the decision 🙂