Is there a high def HD camcorder out there that saves like .dv or .mpg files on the hard drive? So far most of the ones I've found do .mt2s or whatever and that doesn't work with most programs. I would rather not have to go through and convert whatever comes from the drive to something else once its on my computer. I just want to get it, edit it and go.
High Definition camcorders that record to hard drive use the AVCHD format which is an MPEG-4 compression. It is a relatively new format and therefor not yet widely supported by video editing programs. Among the programs that should support it are: Sony Vegas 7&8, Ulead VideoStudio 11 Plus and Studio Plus 11. I'm pretty sure that others will follow soon, but if you use other programs you will have to convert. One note: AVCHD is quite heavily compressed and contains quite long GOP's which means that there is a lot of dependancy between consecutive frames. This means that you need a quite powerful PC. And anyway re-encoding is unavoidable.
