Tom Raftery’s Social Media

I bought a new video camera recently with the intention of doing some video casting. It is a fine camera. Carl Zeiss lenses, shoots in full HD and all. But in my zeal to buy it, I forgot to ask one important question - will it work on the Mac?

Unfortunately, in this case, the answer is no which is a shame as I was hoping to do my editing in iMovie

Even worse though, the camera saves in a special HD format called AVCHD and while it a lovely format I’m sure, there are very few (if any) commercial video editing applications which support it!

The first one I have found - Nero 7 (no link on purpose) had great claims around AVCHD - it could play it, edit it and export to .mpg. Idiot that I am, I bought it and have since been plagued by messages telling me it is demo software and needs to be bought - aaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!!! If that weren’t bad enough, the edited files it exports aren’t usable by any other application. They crash Adobe Premiere Elements and Quicktime (probably sensibly) doesn’t even try to open them.

I’m currently downloading a trial of Sony’s Vegas 7 software but it is a tad pricey. And I’m also going to try Ulead’s Video Studio which seems more reasonably priced but has had a couple of poor reports on the web.

Has anyone else had these kind of issues and/or any suggestions for a resolution?