January 14
High definition video is a royal pain in the ass
Let’s say that Santa brought you a nice shiny new high-definition video camera for Christmas (he did - a Canon HV20 to be precise). Now let’s say that all you want to do with it is shoot a little clip and upload it to Vimeo because that’s what all the cool kids are doing.
Here are just a few of the obstacles you will face:
- Cable not included. That’s right, the Firewire cable you need to connect the camera to your PC isn’t in the box. Who knows why. $5 at Amazon.
- Software not included. I don’t mean to imply that the camera should ship with a full editing package, but it doesn’t even include the minimal software required to get raw video off the camera. For that, you get to download HDVSplit V0.77beta (seriously, click through that link, just to see what the current state of the art is).
- Raw video file is an .m2t file. Nothing knows how to read that. Needs to be converted to mpeg2 program stream. Plus, camera is shooting in 1080, Vimeo wants 720. Hmm. Much Google searching and reading of Wikipedia articles. Exhaustive search for open source / free software to do this. Conclusion: none exists that’s worth your time and effort to attempt using. Download 30-day free trial of Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum.
And then, happiness: you discover Eugenia’s Rants and Thoughts, where she lists in great detail what you need to do for all this stuff. And more for really advanced users. Turns out Eugenia is the spouse of a former Openwave colleague, even though I discovered her through Google. Thanks Eugenia!
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