Saving Video Files. Converting Mp4?

[zowenso]

Hello! New to roxio and toast 11 titanium. After my mini dv handy cam crapped the bed two weeks ago I've been thrust into the digital world of camcorders. I can't believe how difficult they have made this. After battling iMovie and horrible video quality for over a week, I bought Toast. Finally, quality video and it's easy to do! Now, I know DVD isn't the way to go for long term video file storage. I tried to drag video out of toast and onto my desk top so I could drag it into a flash drive, but no luck. So I put the memory card directly into my Mac mini, clicked on the desk top icon for the mem card, searched around the folders until i found little video thumb nails of my video clips and I dragged them onto my desk top. I noticed something different, a MP4 label in the file names. Just for the heck of it, I dragged those mp4 files into toast and burned another disc and the quality was terrible again. Just when I thought I finally had this all figured out. What can I do so that the files I store aren't poor quality? Can Toast do anything to help? I want to store my video files in the best possible quality. Any help would be great! Thanks.

[tsantee]

Toast has an AVCHD Archive option in the Video window for creating as-shot archives of video from a HD camcorder to a set of burned discs. Your camcorder also should come with some software or guides about copying the video to a hard drive for storage. The only reason you should see lower quality when burning a disc in Toast is if you are making a standard-definition video DVD from a HD video source, or if you used Toast's convert window to export a copy at a lower resolution.