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Just downloaded the VS ProX2 demo, which is actually just VS12 with none of the add-0ns such as a HDV viewer. Apart from the background being grey I can can find no real difference to the VS 10+ I already have. When I import HDV I get the same video characteristics at the top of the screen - 720x576 Pal Stereo. The properties of the HDV video imported are correct. I try to 'share' the video segments using 'same as original' specs and end up with a 720x576 mpeg - not the HDV specs I originally had. All I want to do in concatonate several HDV segments into one, which I cannot do with MF. By the way, whoever designed the new MF7 has lost the plot!

If you used 'Same as Project Settings', you will get a standard def mpeg-2. If you use Same as First Clip -- and the first clip is indeed a HDV one -- you will get a HDV clip 1440 x 1080 etc. There is no 'Same as original'...

Personally, with my HDV, I use Share > Create Video File > HDV > HDV 1080i - 50 i (for HDV) to make sure I have the right settings.

I am also not sure what you mean by a 'HDV viewer'... VS12/11.5+/11+ and I thought also 10+ (as I use that still too) could play HDV natively so no special viewer is necessary...

Thanks for the input. Yes I will use the first file as the starting point from now on. What I meant regarding a HDV viewer was something I could put on the desktop that immediately played my HDV mpeg file, not having to go through MF or VS (2 or more steps is more than my wife can handle!). I have had no luck with Windows Media player or any other player - if I buy the full version of VS12 pro, will the included Corel WINDVD player do this for me?. Also, even with a P4 3.4GHZ CPU, playing back the concatonated mpeg file gets jerky at times, even when I turn everything off. I suppose I will have to live with this and resign myself to the fact that the only way I can see full quality is to play my tapes through the camera directly onto a HDV TV. Thanks Ken

First, I am surprised you cannot get WMP to play HDV files. I have WMP 11 and it plays them fine, as does PowerDVD 8 (and 7 did as well) as does WinDVD and Nero ShowTime... HDV is pretty standard stuff these days. It is AVCHD which causes the difficulties.

Next, I am also surprised that you should be having playing it back smoothly. I certainly don't have that problem with my current Quad 6600, but neither did I with my old P4 3.0 GHz with HT. But if you can't get the above software players to play it all, then I would begin to think something else might be wrong with your set-up.

Like you, I initially thought the best way to watch my edited HDV on my HDTV was to export it back to the camera and connect that (Canon HV20) via its HDMI direct to the TV. That worked fine -- though if you have a Canon, you need to use VS10 since it had a patch to allow the export. Unfortunately, the same code does not appear to have been written into VS11/12. But it is only Canon HDV cameras which have this problem.

Nowadays, I either convert the HDV and burn it to a hybrid AVCHD disc which plays on my Sony PlayStation 3 which I have connected to the HDTV. That works fine. But the PS3 is a versatile beast and will play HDV, AVCHD and indeed any sort of video whether it is on a standard DVD, Blu-Ray or AVCHD hybrid disc, or copied to a USB stick drive or external hard drive connected via USB cable or indeed video simply archived on a DVD. Does it beautifully. But the cream on the cake is that the PS3 can also be networked to your computer. So now I can stream all my edited video from the computer via the PS3 (using WMP or Nero MediaHome as the server) direct to my HDTV. Truly wonderful. So I don't have to worry for a long time about buying a Blu-Ray burner or discs!

Thanks Ken, but I already have enough wires and remotes to send my wife crazy without buying a PS3!

I have been on holiday for a while, taking more HDV on the Sony HC5. I have settled on VS10 as the only player I have that will show HDV. I do have a problem though because when I download via firewire from the camera, as I said before it apears on my disk as Mpeg2, about 12GB per hour of video. When I view through VS, the video is very jerky when there is panning. When I view directly connected to the TV the video quality is superb, better than so called HD TV in Australia. I am thinking of buying a blu-ray recorder for the computer, but will I get the same jerky MPEG2 video on the bluray that I get when viewing through VS? Remember I have not even tried to 'render' the MPEG2 video yet to get it to ISO format.
Thanks

Well, I can only say I remain mystified why you are having trouble playing HDV, which is a pretty forgiving format. It could be that your on-board video card cannot cope, particularly since it would be using system RAM, which in your case only starts out at 512 MB. You could certainly try adding more RAM -- I would suggest getting it up to 2 GB. And it is very cheap these days.

That being said, I would think you would probably have similar problems if you installed a Blu-Ray burner/player. With perhaps insufficient system resources, that would be a bit like expecting a Rolls-Royce to run well with a VW Beetle engine...

Incidentally, I suppose you realise that by talking about converting your HDV/mpeg-2 to an ISO, you are automatically talking about down-converting the HDV to standard definition as that is the only thing that can produce an .ISO image file. If you want high definition on disc, you have to burn to Blu-Ray or hybrid AVCHD disc (or the now discontinued HD DVD format). And these use quite different structures to the ISO/Video_TS structures on the disc.

I have 1GB memory now, but when I play the video through VS10 (with everything including internet, checkers etc turned off) the 3.4GHz CPU is showing a constant 100% CPU utilisation, which would normally indicate that I am a bit CPU-short! You may be right about the video controller, it is after all an onboard Gigabyte job. Also thanks for correcting me about .ISO, I assumed I could write a HDV image to disk then get Nero to burn it, as I do now with normal DVDs. Is there a cheat sheet somewhere that leads you through the steps of HDV burning to both disk image and bluray? I do need the disk images, to easily re-burn video.
Thanks Again

You might try installing two small freeware utilities - ffdshow and the Haali media splitter. They might result in lower cpu usage when playing the HDV clips.

My 1.8GHz C2D laptop shows 25 - 31% cpu usage when playing a sample M2T file from a Canon HV30 HDV camcorder, and the processor is generally about twice as fast as my old P4 2.8, which shows around 60% cpu usage when playing the clips using ffdshow and the Haali media splitter.

@Ken - although DDR2 RAM is indeed very cheap right now, the older DDR RAM used in the OP's pc is relatively pricey by comparison, and best found on eBay these days.