New toy: Canon VIXIA HF M41 HD camcorder.

http://www.amazon.co...ory/dp/B004HW7E2O

We got it for a good price ($500) about 6 weeks back. It was a combination birthday/XMas/Anniversary present. ;-) I finally got a chance to use it at Christmas. My only other camcorder experience is with an old Canon Hi8 camera that used tapes. We still have it and it still works fine. This new camera is about 70% as large and much lighter.

It's an amazing little box. The Auto settings are very good - I haven't tired to do anything fancy with it yet. Bright, vivid colors, decent sound, excellent autofocus inside and out. The OIS is very good, but the walking-around images are still shaky when viewed full screen on a large monitor or TV. The autoexposure is very good, even when the sun is in the frame.

I have only used it for about 10 minutes thus far, making 5 clips, and only using the internal memory (it has 32 GB internal storage as well as 2 SDHC slots).

I'm using it with our Mac Mini Server and iMovie 2009. It took me a long time to figure out how to get the Mac to recognize it. Apparently one has to hook up the USB and power cables, and use the buttons on the side to tell the camera what storage to make available for export, before it shows up on the Mac desktop. After that, it was trivial. I was aggressive and told it to import the full HD files (it warned that playback might be jerky at that size, but it seems fine so far). I'm glad that I didn't have to copy the .mts files to the desktop, or use any converters, or buy a later version of iMovie, etc., etc., to get iMovie to recognize it.

I exported a 3.5 minute movie from iMovie as a Medium M4V project that ended up being about 42 MB. That took something like 5 minutes. I'm exporting the full size 3.5 min movie as a QuickTime MOV file at the moment and that is taking about 30 minutes.

I was concerned that I would have to get a faster PC to do even these simple things but the Mini (a Core2 Duo 2.6 GHz with ~~4 GB~~ 8 GB of RAM) is working fine. It may be too much to expect that I can do any editing of the native AVCHD files, but I don't have the time to look into that now anyway.

I haven't tried any editing with iMovie yet. I'm still getting my feet wet.

The HF M41 is highly recommended, so far.

[edit:] RAM size error.

Cheers,
Scott.

Post #352,629 by Another Scott 1/1/12 4:46:56 PM 1/1/12 6:04:09 PM Reply	New toy: Canon VIXIA HF M41 HD camcorder. http://www.amazon.co...ory/dp/B004HW7E2O We got it for a good price ($500) about 6 weeks back. It was a combination birthday/XMas/Anniversary present. ;-) I finally got a chance to use it at Christmas. My only other camcorder experience is with an old Canon Hi8 camera that used tapes. We still have it and it still works fine. This new camera is about 70% as large and much lighter. It's an amazing little box. The Auto settings are very good - I haven't tired to do anything fancy with it yet. Bright, vivid colors, decent sound, excellent autofocus inside and out. The OIS is very good, but the walking-around images are still shaky when viewed full screen on a large monitor or TV. The autoexposure is very good, even when the sun is in the frame. I have only used it for about 10 minutes thus far, making 5 clips, and only using the internal memory (it has 32 GB internal storage as well as 2 SDHC slots). I'm using it with our Mac Mini Server and iMovie 2009. It took me a long time to figure out how to get the Mac to recognize it. Apparently one has to hook up the USB and power cables, and use the buttons on the side to tell the camera what storage to make available for export, before it shows up on the Mac desktop. After that, it was trivial. I was aggressive and told it to import the full HD files (it warned that playback might be jerky at that size, but it seems fine so far). I'm glad that I didn't have to copy the .mts files to the desktop, or use any converters, or buy a later version of iMovie, etc., etc., to get iMovie to recognize it. I exported a 3.5 minute movie from iMovie as a Medium M4V project that ended up being about 42 MB. That took something like 5 minutes. I'm exporting the full size 3.5 min movie as a QuickTime MOV file at the moment and that is taking about 30 minutes. I was concerned that I would have to get a faster PC to do even these simple things but the Mini (a Core2 Duo 2.6 GHz with ~~4 GB~~ 8 GB of RAM) is working fine. It may be too much to expect that I can do any editing of the native AVCHD files, but I don't have the time to look into that now anyway. I haven't tried any editing with iMovie yet. I'm still getting my feet wet. The HF M41 is highly recommended, so far. [edit:] RAM size error. Cheers, Scott. Edited by Another Scott Jan. 1, 2012, 06:04:09 PM EST Expand All History
Post #352,643 by drook 1/1/12 9:15:26 PM Reply	You should be able to do the AVCHD Your specs are more than enough, according to all the research I did. One possible caveat: I was researching for Final Cut Express. When working with high-resolution video you work with a low-res copy in real time and save your edits as a reference movie. Then when you render it applies your edits to the high-res source. See "reference movie" here for more -- http://www.dvcreator...gh-quality-movie/ -- Drew
Post #352,645 by Another Scott 1/1/12 9:32:31 PM Reply	I was hoping you'd comment. :-) Thanks for the pointers.

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