I'm a well versed IT Professional with most of my experience in the Mac world of video editing. I just picked up a HV20 for my home where I'm currently running Vista on my media center machine. I'm just wondering if anyone has any opinions on using the Canon HV20 under Windows Vista Home Premium and what editing software to use?

There are plenty of demos out for most of the software packages, but most of them aren't Vista compatible. Even with the ones that are, the patches for Vista only apply to the full product and not the demo! Some, such as Pinnancle Studio won't even install under Vista. I got Ulead's VideoStudio 10 Plus to install, but it refuses to import video from the HV20 (it usually just crashes instead). Of course, Ulead has a Canon HV10 patch out (which I assume might work for the HV20), but it doesn't work on the demo, only the retail version - so I have no idea even if it will work with the HV20.

I'm also wanting the ability to burn my footage to HD DVD via a standard DVD-R for playback via an Xbox 360 HD DVD drive or standalone HD DVD player. With that in mind, I'm currently leaning towards Ulead VideoStudio 10 Plus, which seems to support Vista and HD DVD burning via standard DVDs. However, I recently got a coupon from Ulead advertising Ulead VideoStudio 11 Plus! So, I'm wondering if I should just hold off until 11 is released. Anyone using 10 under Vista? Any personal recommendations for any software packages running under Vista and using the Canon HV20 would be great! I just need something.

I was in the same boat as you about a month ago. Had pre-ordered the HV20 and was looking around to see what I would use for editting. I had an older (read nearly ancient) camcorder that works and had been using various versions of Pinnacle (8,9 & 10) to import from it. Got a new machine (and recently upgraded to Vista Ultimate) and the input card for my analog was no longer supported by Pinnacle. Pinnacle had always frustrated me by crashing, being a memory hog or just not doing what I wanted it to do. Leaving it was a no brainer for me.

I downloaded and looked at a few trials and really liked the Vegas product for it's feature vs price point. The Vegas mega-package has it's media manager which is not compatible with Vista, though it will run on it just fine. I've already got other mechanisms for managing my stuff and didn't need another one, so I cancelled that part of the installation and just disabled Vegas from trying to load the manager. Works great and is a 1000% improvement in every aspect over Pinnacle.

The only issue I had following the install of Vegas is that I started getting a "Media Center Receiver Service has stopped working" error occasionally. Recently it got worse. I also had this happen after installing some other apps as well. I don't use my Media Center for recording TV right now so I just disabled the service. Not a lick of problems since.

I've got the 360 & the HD-DVD Drive as well. Because of the space limitations on standard DVD's being burned for HD content, I'm not going out of my way to work there. I'll record in HD and just make some nice DVDs in wide screen format. When either BluRay or HD-DVD wins out, then I'll get a burner for that format and start doing it that way. Until then I just stream my HD video files to the TV using XBox & the media center. I do have Nero 7 which will burn HD-DVD's onto a standard DVD. Eventually DVD Architect should support creating an HD-DVD (hopefully before version 8) and if so, then I can do that too. Any DVD I'd be burning would also be for other members of the family and none of them have HD-DVD player, BluRay let alone an HDTV, so standard DVD will work just fine for me for at least another year.

I do like what I've seen with the Adobe Premier apps but I'm not as fond of the pricing on it for what it does. Over 2x as expensive as Vegas. I like certain aspects of how things can be done, but not that well. I just do my video's for personal use, so it's harder to justify spending that kind of money. My wife is twitching from seeing the bill for the HV20, DM-50, extra battery pack and Vegas! If I bought the Adobe package, should probably would have had a bout of spontaneous combustion right then and there.


--Steve

Thanks for the advice Steve! I'll checkout the demo of Vegas!

One additional thing I'll say about the Media Center Receiver Service error I was getting is that it's probably not related to Vegas specifically. I saw some other people were getting the same issue with products from Nero, Sonic and others.

My guess is that the receiver service is trying to utliize the capture card on the box at the same time the other apps are trying to utilize it and causes the crash. I don't work in the Windows group, so that's just a guess based on what I've seen and heard.

I do know that some of the other demo's I had could never initialize that capture device (Vegas included). Nero did, but the quality of the capture was miserable. Not blaming Nero for that though, probably just the cheap capture card that came with the HP machine. I haven't tried Nero's capture with the HV20 yet..

--Steve

Actually Vegas Media Manager DOES work in Vista... It's the old microsoft SQL server that has problems.

You have to uninstall media manager, install the newer microsoft SQL Express then reinstall media manager.

There is a discussion on the topic on the Sony board under the "VISTA" topic.

Can't comment on Vegas and Vista. But it's been pretty much confirmed at this point that Vegas 7 (most recent ver.) cannot automatically remove pulldown from HV20 24p files. The hope is an update to Vegas for the Sony V1U (HDV 24p files) will fix this. Vegas 7 should work with your 60i HV20 files no problem though.

You can't extract the 24p on the fly but you can if you select the 1080/24p preset and render it out.

Cineform HD link WILL remove the pulldown on the fly while capturing. However, I am not sure if cineform works under vista