Is the Pixela ImageMixer™ 3SE software that comes with the HF10/100 worth using or should I just figure on purchasing pinnacle studio or vegas?

I'm not realy wanting to do any major editing or anything but something that works well with the AVCHD format and can burn a quick dvd.

IME, the software that comes with scanners, cameras & camcorders is all pretty lame. Just good enough to do the basics & that's it. (Which is actually quite good, IMO, because I'm sure it would bump up the price of equipment & I prefer making my software choices independent of the equipment I buy.) Pixela came with my first Sony camcorder six years ago. I think I used it five times & then bagged it for Vegas. (Vegas was version 4 back then & I finally upgraded to the current version about three months ago or so.)

I would recommend that you plan on purchasing software but wait until you have a chance to dink with Pixela & see what you think of it.

Could you give me a rough idea on how long it takes to burn a standard def. DVD using Pixela? I understand they will only hold about 30 min. of video so Aprox. how long does it take to burn that?

I read where someone was using Pinnical and it took like 12 hrs to burn a 15 min. dvd.

I never used Pixela to burn a DVD. Regarding the time, it depends. I use a combination of a few programs to create/edit footage, then use DVD Lab Pro to author the DVD. That process can take quite a while, depending upon how much footage you're using.

Once the DVD is rendered, it only normally takes 7-15 minutes (IIRC) to actually burn the DVD, again depending upon the length of the video (I normally only do @20-30 minutes worth), the speed of the burner & the speed of your computer.

Having said all that, once I've completed all my importing & editing, I've never had a DVD that took 12 hours to render and burn. Also, at standard def, a standard, single layer DVD should hold about 3-4 hours worth of footage. It sounds like the numbers you mentioned were referring to HD.

(This is all standard def, since I don't have a HD cam.)

I got my HF100 and shot some video in LP mode. Tried manipulating it with the Pixela software that came with it. It was sufficient for my basic needs: let me trim unwanted parts of a clip, let me join multiple clips into one and let me burn them onto a regular DVD too.

That said, I did not find the software very intuitive. It took me some time to get around and figure out how to do things. [Why does it not let me burn a DVD from imported videos? The option to burn dvd's is not available if the camcorder is not connected to the computer]

Also, the time it took for doing things was unbelievable.. It took me nearly 40 mins to burn just 6 minutes of video onto a regular DVD. I was expecting large times, and can live with this as long as the software can handle large video files. I hope to burn a DVD containing atleast 30 minutes of video soon, let's see how that goes.

You didn't mention your background. Are you new to editing/burning? If so, I would have to say it takes a few times to get familiar with the process. IE, when I first got into making my own DVDs, I purchased Nero Ultra because it was easy & intuitive. By the time I'd authored my ~third DVD, I felt limited by Nero. I ended up buying DVD Lab Pro, which I'd trialed along with Nero Ultra & had found DVD Lab Pro too confusing to me, at that time. But after becoming comfortable with the process & wanting to be more creative than Nero allowed, I've found DVD Lab Pro to be the best authoring software for me. My point is that (IME), the software that was intuitive, later became stifling, once I became familiar with the process.

Just to clarify...creating a DVD that will play in a stand alone player is a multi process deal. There is capturing & editing & rendering the footage. Then there is authoring (adding multiple movies, adding chapters, creating menus, etc.) These processes can take up to several hours, depending upon how much footage you're dealing with & how much time you spend on editing & authoring.

Then there is burning. BURNING is when the stuff is actually burned to the DVD. BURNING should never take more than 7-15 minutes, depending upon the speed of your burner & your processor.

I agree, I am new at least to video editing. So that could be one reason why I did not find Pixela very intuitive.

The time I mentioned was just the time it took to go from the .mts file on the harddisk to standard definition DVD format(VOB) on DVD, without any manual authoring/editing stuff. I just wanted to see how long it takes to burn a SD DVD from high definition footage. Having read about the difficulties with lower end machines doing the conversion from AVCHD to SD video format, I wanted to see how my system ranked.

Continuing to enjoying my HF100....

Pinnacle Studio 11.1.2 takes about 10 minutes or so on my system. Render time may be what eats some folks up. My computer is a Dell XPS 420 Quad core 2.4GH with 4GB of RAM and I'm only trying to edit in 1440x1080 at 12Mbps. Render time is greatly affected by how much post processing I have done in Studio. If I have to apply 3 effects to the same clip (Say color/brightness, a visual effect such as radial blur, and cropping) then rendering times will be agonizingly slow, but if I only have to apply one effect it goes a lot faster.

I haven't tried burning a DVD with Pixela because the editing is so awkward and imprecise in addition to not offering much function. But I do use the player to evaluate the .MTS files and to view AVCHD edited in Pinnacle Studio.

I find the Pixela software to be extremely slow and awkward to edit with. I've used Pinnacle Studio since one of their earliest versions and in version 11 plus (12 is released now) it will edit AVCHD natively (does take some very healthy computer horsepower, see www.pinnaclesys.com for specifics) and then allow me many options with the edited result. I can burn in SD to standard DV, in HD (AVCHD in BluRay compliant format) on standard DVD that will play in BluRay players or PlayStation3, or to 1280x720p at 60fps WMV file that looks fantastic on a good computer monitor, MP4 HD file that looks almost as great, and smaller MP4 files for uploading to YouTube.

Version 12 adds among other things the ability to author to BluRay disk media.

The editing can be as simple as you want to keep it and you can grow from there as you learn how to use other basic and advanced features. I do recommend that you purchase either the plus or ultimate package as the basic version lacks the second video track needed to effortlessly add "cutaway" clips, use lumakey or chromakey, and video overlay clips.

To see the latest short I've done with the HF100 and edited in Pinnacle Studio 11.1.2 check this out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HF2qncrs2I

I've just purchased the Canon HF10, and don't like the Pixela software at all and want to avoid it completely, even for getting the files from the camcorder to the computer. So I would say it is well worth avoiding at all cost.

The issue is what software to replace it with. Nero 7 and 8 can play AVCHD files, and can edit and burn them too (but seems to convert the MTS or m2ts files to mp4 files, and mp4 files can't be openned or edited in other software like Pinnacle or Ulead. And anyway Nero is not much more fun to use for editing than Pixela.

So I've decided to give Pinnacle Studio 12 Ultimate a go, mainly because it is the newest and should have it's avchd act together. It seems to edit and output the result to disc pretty well, but I have a question for those who say they are using Pinnacle software in this thread.

How do you output the edited Studio 12 files to another m2ts file with the same properties as the input file? In the file output option box this option does not exist.

The only way I can see one can do this is to output the file to a disc image and then use the m2ts file from the stream folder of this image. Am I on the right track?

Your findings match mine. You have no option to output to AVCHD file. There are two options for AVCHD disc one is for a BluRay compatible ant the other AVCHD disc. You are missing any further control over audio and video output formats. When I outputed the AVCHD disc option Pinnacle produced a disc folder and I copied the .m2ts file on to the HF10 using explorer replacing one of the same name I had created on the HF10. The .m2ts file seemed to match the HF10 format except the AC3 datarate was 192kbps instead of 256kbps. The HF10 just does not see the file at all using this method. However, I did open the .m2ts file in PIXELA for edit and saved it without making any changes as H.264. Then used the PIXELA option to transfer the file to the camcorder. That did work but took a bit of time. I have no idea what reformatting took place it was too quick for a full transcode but too slow to just be a remultiplexing. The result worked and quality was still superb. I too seek a better solution.

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Max
Canon HF-10, Canon S3IS and tons of stuff

I totally agree with this, including your opinion about the superb quality. Still it would be good to know exactly what is happening in this process.

At the moment, I have totally jettisoned the Pixela software. There are other and easier ways to get the footage off the camcorder and / or SDHC card (and since I never put it back on again after editing, I don't have to go through the process you outline).

But yes, I too seek a better way, but until then I am still getting brilliant results from HF 10 footage edited with Pinnacle studio 12.

I'm pretty sure we will find that 'better way' as AVCHD settles into being a more supported format over the coming months.