Canon HG10 and Hi-Def.....?

[Tracks83]

I'm purchasing a Canon HG10 Cmacorder. It records in 1080 and I was wondering if I were to purchase for example a Sony BWU200s Blue-ray drive for my computer. Would I be able to burn the hard drive off the camcorder on to a Blue Ray disk and watch a 1080 video on my Plasma. Would this work? Would this work even though the HG10 records in AVCHD format? I want to get my facts straight before I layout the money for this camera.

[californiajay]

Depends on a couple of things...

First, which blu-ray player do you own? You must have one that will play either BDMV format blu-ray video burned onto a blu-ray disk with your burner, or one which will play AVCHD (you do not need a blu-ray burner to burn these, you can use normal DVDs for this, they will give you video looking just as good as bdmv but since it is not on a blu-ray disk you will only get about 20 minutes or so worth of high def video). The Panasonic players support both formats, the Sonys AVCHD. Others I am not sure of, though depending on the firmware version, some of the older Samsungs support BDMV.

Next, is the software. Pinnacle Studio 11 Plus will import your AVCHD files from the camcorder and allow you to burn AVCHD video onto DVDs, but it will not author BDMV to blu-ray disks. To do this on a PC, you need a program such as Roxio DVDit. This will allow you to author to blu-ray disks and create professional looking menus for your videos as well. Keep in mind that this solution is ONLY to burn to disk and create the menus. You still need an editing program like Studio 11 to do the editing.

I use this camcorder and videos created using either BDMV or AVCHD look fantastic when played back on my Panasonic BD-30. Again, the difference being is that the BDMV format is recorded to blu-ray disks and will give you 2 hours worth of video, the AVCHD format is recorded to standard DVDs but will only give you 20 minutes. Not too many blu-ray players support BDMV but AVCHD is very much up and coming and is probably more future proof.

Hope this helps.