Hi Folks,

Few weeks ago I bought Canon HF20 and took some clips in HD format while holidaying in England.

Now I want to burn it into a DVD. I do NOT want to do editing. I have got 265 clips (each 10 or less minutes).

I am not an expert in these areas. I have a few questions, please reply.

1. Is it possible to burn these clips in HD format into normal blank (R+ or R-) DVDs ? If NOT, is it possible to convert into SD format and burn it into DVD?

2. Is it possible to save those 265 clips as a back-up in a DVD, so that I can burn it into BLU-RAY disk in the future in HD format? B'cos at this moment I dont have HD player, but I dont want to lose those precious clips which I recorded in HD format. Sometimes in the future, I might purchase HDTV and I may want to create HD vdo from these clips.


Please reply,

much appreciated and thanks in advance,


Suresh.

1. Is it possible to burn these clips in HD format into normal blank (R+ or R-) DVDs ? If NOT, is it possible to convert into SD format and burn it into DVD?The answer to both questions is yes. If you burn the HD files to a DVD disc (my Samsung Bluray player happens to use DVD-R), you will get about 25 minutes of playtime and the image will appear in HD (1080i) resolution. If you have a Play Station 3, you can play the AVCHD files directly otherwise you will have to have a BR file structure on the DVD disc.

You can also convert to a lower (SD) resolution and create standard DVDs playable on normal TVs.

Your Canon camcorder may come with software to perform the tasks of creating BR structures on DVD discs or converting to SD. (I have a Sony SR11 and its provided PMB software does this very nicely for people with little technical experience.)

In either case, you can (and should) keep the original m2ts (AVCHD) files for future use.

2. Is it possible to save those 265 clips as a back-up in a DVD, so that I can burn it into BLU-RAY disk in the future in HD format? B'cos at this moment I dont have HD player, but I dont want to lose those precious clips which I recorded in HD format. Sometimes in the future, I might purchase HDTV and I may want to create HD vdo from these clips.You can save the raw m2ts files on a DVD disc and I suggest that you do this regardless so that you have some kind of back-up of the original files. You might even consider buying an inexpensive external hard drive.

You can roughly calculate that an m2ts file (AVCHD clip) of about 12 minutes length requires about 2 GB of data. A SL DVD disc holds about 4.7 GB of data.

If you plan to use the Pixela software that comes with your Canon camcorder this post should help you for part 1 of what you want to do:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=14788124#post14788124

In your case you will not need to do very much editing.
However you will need to do some selection, pasting and (possibly)merging if you want to use the Pixela software.
In my example I also did some trimming of some of the clips.
If you only do simple cut editing (and in your case just really selection), with no transitions or titling or audio overlay/adjustment,
you will find the AVCHD Movie "edit" process using Pixela to be pretty fast, and you don't lose any quality.

You will need to use DVD-R, as Pixela will not work with DVD+R.

My HF100 recorded at 17Mbps. Your camcorder bit rate may be different and this effects how many minutes of AVCHD video you get on each DVD-R.

I'm not sure all your clips will fit on one SD DVD either.
Most of my clips were very short. I don't know what your average clip length is.
On one standard single layer DVD you will only get about 90 minutes of video at a continuous bit recording rate of 6000 kbps
which is the "Standard" quality used in Pixela when you burn a SD DVD-R.

Don't forget, Pixela only allows you 99 "clips" or "titles" on any disc that it burns for you.
Perhaps making up several "DVD lists" and lots of "AVCHD lists" is all you may need to do.


If your computer is powerful enough, Pixela will work fine for what you want to do.