Hi there,
I have had my HG10 for about 2 weeks now and quite happy with my choice. I am using Pinaccle studio 11 for editing. I have a PS3 and a 42'' HD flat tv. Editing is not the problem, i can figure it out. What iam having problems with is which file format i should encode\convert my final video to.
I use the camera mainly for family occasions, nothing professional. each movie i make is about 40-60 minutes shot in highest quality setting. What i would like to do is:

1) burn the final copy to a dvd( i have dual layer dvd) in the best quality så i can watch it on my tv screen through PS3. would like to have the best quality that can fit on the duallayer DVD.

2) make another copy for archiving and save it on my 1 tetrabyte external harddisk.

After finishing editing the clips, i get totaly lost at the point where i should make the final movie. Which format should I convert the final movie to. in the menu there is a lot of options Mpeg2, dvd, mpeg1, avi, divx, wmv hd and others.

pls. help as i am getting creazy here.

You can either burn an AVCHD disk, this is just AVCHD file on disk, nothing else, no menu, no chapters. Or you can create a proper Blu-ray disk on a regular DVD, you can use either AVC or MPEG-2 for that. Use 1440x1080 frame size with 1.33 pixel aspect ratio. Play with bitrate, verify that your PS3 does not choke on high bitrates. Usually bitrates of about 15 to 18 Mb/s work fine. With 25 Mb/s rates you may experience freezing and stuttering. Use the slowest burn speed and the best DVD recordable blanks you can find.

I am not sure that Pinnacle can prepare Blu-ray disk, but there are other utilities that can.

A copy is a copy, nothing fancy about that. Just burn your files onto DVD. If these are proper AVCHD files, your PS3 will be able to play them. This may be the easiest thing for you: the same DVD would function both as storage and as playable disk.

As your final export, i would recommend mpeg4, wmv or dvx. WMV is pretty good in terms of compression and playback, however PS3 does not like wmv for now. So i would probably go with mpeg4/avc next. Again, good compression and PS3 will be happy with them too, but if u take it to your friends house, he may need to install some new codecs.

The best way is to experiment around, try each with different bitrates, different resolutions to find the best combination that suits your needs. Video encoding can be very tricky at start, but once u make enough mistakes and learn from them, u will be a pro in no time.

many thanks for your replies.

I trieg the hdv-2 conversion and it works great. I have though one question. the file i get after the conversion is an .mpg file. I also downloaded acopy og sony vega and tried the same conversion hdv-2. using sony vegas i get an .M2T file. is there any difference betwwen the 2 file formats.