I'm looking at purchasing my first Camcorder. Probably one of the new Panasonic HD camcorders with an internal hard drive.

I've played with the movie mode with digital still cameras a lot, and made many home videos using simple Non-Linear Video editors (NLE) (my wife uses WinXP Movie Maker, and I use Linux Kdenlive).

Do any users have some experience in using modern Camcorders with the Linux Operating System ?

Note that I'm an average to moderately advanced Linux user, and I have been using Linux as my sole Operating System at home since 1998. I concede both MacIntosh and Windows have superior video processing software for home users. Still, I prefer Linux open source free software solutions, if I can follow that approach.

I'm assuming the new High Definition camcorders (with a built in Hard drive and) with an USB-2.0 interface can be plugged in and mounted like any external hard drive to ones Computer/Operating System.

Has anyone tried to edit a HD video with a Linux NLE ? (such as Kino, KDEnlive, or Cinelerra) ? I'm wondering how they handle the 1920x1080 resolution (and for example, MPEG4-AVC/H.264 codec) ... I routinely use KDEnlive to edit videos from my digital still camera (640x480 @ 30fps) but 1920x1080 is a completely different league.

My computer (for the video editing) has 4GB RAM and a P8400 processor and a 250 GB Hard drive, so I suspect it is not too badly equipped for handling the processing. I also have 2 Terabytes of offline external drive storage.

Apologies if this camcorder thread is the wrong forum sub-area, but this appeared to me to be the best bet for chatting about software that interfaces to a Camcorder, and software that processes the images from a Camcorder.

It does appear that the authors of kdenlive (NLE software for Linux KDE desktop) are making some progress with AVCHD processing, as they try to take advantage of advances in the free open source package ffmpeg:
http://www.kdenlive.org/forum/news-about-avchd-and-hardware-decoding

I had one Linux user recommend to me that if one were to procure a camcorder that uses DV or HDV technology, that one try to ensure that camcorder supports Firewire.

Purportedly, under Linux, the firewire is faster (than USB), and with firewire camcorders can be controlled from within Linux applications like kino and kdenlive. In other words, the applications can start the cam, stop the cam, rewind, fast forward, pause.............

USB (under Linux) is cumbersome in comparison, constantly downloading files from the device, then opening in the desired application.

Again, I suspect the above is more DV/HDV specific, and not so much applicable to the camcorders that have AVCHD.

Plus there is the issue of compatibility (under Linux) where some USB devices are recognized and some are not, ... some require hacks and workarounds ... Firewire tends to work better in terms of reliability under Linux.

But I should note the above is only what I learned from surfing and exchanging posts with others .... and not from my own first hand experience.

I've used Kino to import from my Sony miniDV over firewire using Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn). It was like iMovie, insofar as the software controlling the camcorder mechanism. It worked until I upgraded to Hearty Heron, after which I never could use it again.

Trying to switch NLE meant that Ubuntu would 'uninstall' a working library, then error out on trying to find the new one. Then I would have to edit my universe to find the new library, and maybe it was there, maybe it wasn't. I got frustrated with certain video libraries that refuse to be on the same machine with each other. I gave up on Linux (for video editing), and went back to iMovie.

That said, I use Ubuntu exclusively for all my internet. it is nice having a machine that is not bogged down with bloatware, and is fully compatible with Office, for FREE.

It does appear that the authors of kdenlive (NLE software for Linux KDE desktop) are making some progress with AVCHD processing, as they try to take advantage of advances in the free open source package ffmpeg:
http://www.kdenlive.org/forum/news-about-avchd-and-hardware-decoding
I dragged the files from here ( http://www.poure.com/footage/panasonic/hdc-sd100/ ) into kdenlive, and they were recognized and I was able to drag them to the kdenlive timeline to create a short custom video based on them.

The kdenlive clipmonitor and project monitor struggled a bit in displaying them (they were displayed in a degraded manner by those monitors), and so my edits were approximate. But the transitions and rendering worked ok, creating a high quality output video. This was on a Dell Studio 15 laptop with an Intel dual core P8400 cpu and 4GB of RAM running openSUSE-11.1.

As noted in the quote, there is a very recent (svn) ffmpeg update available that I have not yet installed. It is supposed to offer a significant improvement in avchd handling and I plan to try that in the next week or two.

I also note that smplayer (front end to mplayer) plays the avchd videos with no problem, as does vlc play them well. But xine did not display with the same quality. I did not try a gstreamer based app. ... Again, I did not have the latest ffmpeg installed.

kadath was kind enough to post a link to a sample raw mts clip from his new very very nice Sony HDR-XR500V. I posted here on this:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=15959898#post15959898

In essence, I was able to play this file with Linux ffplay and render it with the non-linear video editor kdenlive (I'm using version 0.7.2.1 of kdenlive, built against libffmpeg/ffmpeg version from 11-Feb-2009 (which is pretty new, albeit not the newest). There is a newer version of ffmpeg (released after 11-Feb) with even more AVCHD fixes).

But the transitions and rendering worked ok, creating a high quality output video. This was on a Dell Studio 15 laptop with an Intel dual core P8400 cpu and 4GB of RAM running openSUSE-11.1.
As a note, I repeated this operation on two older PCs.
desktop 32-bit athlon-2800+ with 2GB ram and nVidia FX5200 graphics (4+ years old)
desktop 32-bit athlon-1100+ with 1GB ram and nVidia mx440 graphics (9 years old).
In all cases PCs running openSUSE-11.1 with latest kdenlive and recent svn version of ffmpeg.

The 9 year old athlon-1100+ was very slow. But edit and rendering worked. Playing of the raw .mts file saw significant stuttering. But the rendered file played fine!

The Intel dual core P8400 was about 8x to 9x faster than the athlon-1100+ and about 2.5x to 3x faster than the athlon-2800+.

Neither than athlon-2800+ nor 1100+ will install the MS-Windows NLE offerings, as those processors are too old for Windows NLE.

But the video can be processed with Linux. ... (noting that Linux is a completely different operating system than Mac or Windows, and it can drive those users to distraction when attempting to migrate to a different OS).

kadath was kind enough to post a link to a sample raw mts clip from his new very very nice Sony HDR-XR500V.
I found some raw mts clips from a Canon HF_11 and tested playing them on all 3 of my PCs with openSUSE-11.1 and ffplay.
athlon-1100 - both play and audio were stuttering
athlon-2800 - both play and audio were stuttering
intel core2 duo P8400 - play back of audio and video appeared smooth, but video clearly lagged the audio by an increasing amount.
Rendering the raw .mts files with kdenlive worked on all 3 PCs (and playback of rendered files was ok).

This was with the 11-Feb-2009 svn version of ffmpeg. There is a newer svn version, which purportedly has more AVCHD "fixes" , so I will need to update and see if those improve the playback of the raw .mts files.

I found some raw mts clips from a Canon HF_11 and tested playing them on all 3 of my PCs with openSUSE-11.1 and ffplay.

Further to this, I noted this page on the kdenlive site, where they list their estimated compatibility with various camcorders on the market: http://www.kdenlive.org/video-editor

Its interesting they list the HF 11 as "unsupported yet" although my testing indicated I can render the files with kdenlive (although raw playback of the mts was not good).