Thayer asked for some tips on getting video from the HG10 in suitable form for uploading to YouTube or Blip.tv

Please do not take this as a definitive way of doing things – I AM FREQUENTLY WRONG! – However, it seems to have worked for me so far, though I had to bodge around for a bit, so there may well be better, easier ways to do it, so please let me know if you find them. Oh and I’m doing it on a PC running XP – iMovie doubtlessly cleans your shoes for you while it’s speedily encoding and compressing.

First off, I installed all of the software that came with the camera – I can’t remember what all of it was, but basically I chucked everything at it.

Then this is what I do. You get files off the camera in .mts format. I start up the Corel Ulead DVD Movie Factory and create a new project. Since we’re just going to export to another type of file I don’t think it matters whether you go for a DVD project or a AVCHD project so just choose whichever one you think goes best with your eyes.

Click on the Add Video Files icon (film strip) at the top left hand corner. Choose a file and then click on the Export Selected Clips icon about half way down. (You can process more than one clip at a time by the way – if you’ve got a bunch to do)

I choose Customize…

In the file save as dialog that comes up I give it a name and change the type to .avi.

Then click on Options. I scale the frame size down to 720 x 540 on the General Tab and on the AVI tab I choose the DivX Codec with standard settings.

Then click Save. Close down Movie Factory. Fire up Windows Movie Maker or your favourite video editing program and import the .avi file for editing. With these settings the .avi is about one-third the size of the .mts file.

You may find that different codecs with different settings give you better results but having stumbled over something that works well enough, I’m not going to start messing around.