I'm trying to capture my first HD footage from a new Canon HV30 mini DV camcorder. I previously captured Sony Digital 8 footage and I've always selected DV quality so I can have the best image possible for use in editing. File sizes were generally 11 GB for about an hour of tape.

When I hook up my new Canon HD, I don't get an option on the Quality pull-down menu for AV. It is only "Best Quality (MPEG2), 1440 x 1080, 29.97 fps stereo." I think this is a compressed file format, isn't it? Is it possible to capture in uncompressed HD format?

Congratulations on your choice !

I have that camera and the native format is mpg2. Yes, that is a compressed file format compared to AVI but the quality is so much better than analog that I'm not sure you need to worry about AVI. I think all HiDef consumer cameras do some compression so they are either mpg2 or AVCHD. Mpg2 is a standard and needs no further format changes; AVCHD must be converted to mpg2 for burning. Not all AVCHD formats are the same and decoders are in the state of flux. VideoWave does not do AVCHD.

I hope that your computer has the horsepower for the video editing. Make sure that the whole video is loaded into Video Wave before trying to edit. It is going to take a while. Clear a lot of space on your hard drives.

Just wondering - do you have a Blu ray burner and player? I don't but the DVDs burned fro the HiDef are really good.

Look here. This is a section of a 38 minute video, highly edited and then converted to wmv and then to flash (Camtasia Studio won't take mpg2 files). Quality is still very good. Size is small for upload/download speed.

Try the 24p in low light conditions. If you don't want to carry a still camera and the video camera, try taking pictures with the camcorder. They were surprisingly good. Ignore the subject matter; just look at the details.

Which birds were the subject???

I didn't have time to set up/trim the background !

The WMV file was nice indeed. The still looks good too. I haven't yet experimented with stills on the Canon. Is this a frame grab from some HD video or a still saved to the memory card (or stick or whatever it's called).

Don't own a Blu-Ray burner. Afraid to even look at what they cost right now.

I tried editing a bit of the HD video in Videowave. It was very difficult. Took a long time to trim a clip. I was cutting in some HD with analog video. Tried to play back about 30 seconds. Computer froze and I lost the whole thing. I'm thinking maybe it's time to go Mac for video editing! (Am I allowed to say that here?).

Back to the AVI question -- maybe I'm just being too anal retentive, but is it even possible to capture my HD video non-compressed?

NO

I think that you are mixing analog and digital. With analog, you can capture in AVI uncompressed. Digital is already compressed (has to be) so doing anything with it such as outputting the mpg2 to avi (and then back to Mpg2 to burn) will do more harm than just working with the mpg2 files.

I warned you about how long it takes to load a file into video wave. My guess is also that it takes longer for loading of all the other files that you don't see (proxy, dat, etc.) also takes longer. I found that loading the file and then walking away for some cold refreshments will usually help.

The image was from a still image captured to the stick.

What computer hardware do you have?

karri also has that camcorder; perhaps she can add more about what has worked for her.

I am still working on what works for me

I bought a 500 GB external drive which works great for these huge files.

I captured a couple of tapes using HDVSplit, which I like because it separates the entire tape into separate files, depending on where you stopped/started recording. The problem with this method was that my audio went out of sync in VW. I'm not sure that this is why for sure, but it was the only thing I had done differently.

I am outputting to mp4 files, as per Vimeo format suggestions. So far they have come out fairly well, considering I'm still figuring things out.

Great still pic quality, Steve. I haven't played with that yet!

I also found that 24p, like Steve mentioned, works pretty well in lower light situations.

I've only had the camera for a few weeks, so I'm going to be figuring things out for a while. Hope to add more as I learn more