Hi all,

I've been reading posts for a while and learned a lot so far. I am a newbie in the HD world but I am ready to learn. I bought a HMC151 3 weeks ago (I needed the pal and ntsc option) and a new editing PC with the works.
But life hasn't been so good the past few days!!!!
I love the camera. I still need to get used to all the options, but that will come with time. What I just can't stand is the editing process. Untill now I have tryed multiple editing programs, but somehow they all fail!
Vegas studio 9 pro hangs when creating a movie longer than 35 minutes.
Pinnacle studio 12 is a bit too consumer orientated. It created a blue ray disk but only needed 3,5 GB for 45 min of full HD 1080i movie. The result was not great, but at least the disk played on a BR player :)
I have Edius and Premiere CS4 left to try.

Can someone tell me which of these programs works best, and what setting I should use for best quality files and blu ray movies?

Thank you,

Alex.

Have you tried the version of Edius Neo 2 that currently ships with the camera? I find the Canopus HQ intermediate format to be a very good quality, and easy to edit on even quite modest machines.

I will try that as soon as I get the serial nr from panasonic.
To which format should I export for blu ray (from Edius)?

Thanks.

As far as I know you can export directly from the Edius Neo 2 timeline to Blu ray disc. Not sure if you can author Blu ray from Neo 2 -although I'm sure you can with the full Edius 5 package.

Not a 'Blu-ray' man myself, I'm afraid. Decided I'd had enough with discs with DVD, and now just save my HD edits as Mp4 or Xvids, for replay through my media player, via HDMI to my HD TV.

Excellent quality - no more discs!

Maybe someone with more hands on 'Blu-ray' experience can recommend the best options for using that medium?

Thanks for the info.

It's kind of difficult to navigate in between all the options that you have nowadays.
I do think that if you want to share/show your videos to others, blu ray will be the medium.
Time will tell.

I am an EDIUS user and have been for some years now. Currently I am on version 5.
Last month I had the 151 in for some test shot.
The workflow I chose was, copy the clips to pc, convert them to HQ with the EDIUS AVCHD converter software, edit, and you can output directly to Blu-Ray from the timeline.
The inbuilt Blu-Ray software does a fine job and the bitrate in around 22mbit. This gives a beautiful picture on my Panasonic full HD 46” plasma.
EDIUS is very intuitive and rock solid.
Try it, you won’t regret.

I made some test clips yesterday and was impressed by the quality of the codec Edius uses.
Even AVCHD directly into the timeline was ok.
Any major differences between Edius Neo 2 and Edius 5?

I have used EDIUS for about 5 years now and find it to bee just the tool for my kind of work, mainly cooperate. I can’t comment on NEO though as I have newer tried it.

One of the differences between NEO and EDIUS 5 is that 5 have support for prof. Cameras XDCAM, PROHD and others.
I don’t know what else differs Neo and 5 but if you don’t miss anything, why upgrade!

For more information take a look at Canopus official homepage Grass Valley Desktop & Enterprise Video (http://www.canopus.com)