We got a much needed upgrade for our camcorder (we had one of the very first digital ones on 8mm tape) and went to a Canon Vixia HF20 that can do 1080p and 25Mbs (one of the highest data rates from their advertising anyway).
The software that comes with it for putting the video clips on to a DVD in AVCHD just plain sucks... It came with "ImageMixer 3 SE Ver.5"
Sure, the quality of the end result video is quite good, even though it has to downgrade the video to 18Mbs, but the big issue is that the interface and customization abilities just aren't there. I added several clips, some short, some long (one was 20 minutes non-stop) and it doesn't seem to have an option to set up different "chapter" buttons from the main menu (put in the disc, and everything shows up under one menu item). It does let you move through "chapters" marked by each clip as it plays, but you can't select anything from the menu.
It also forces the audio to come up as Japanese on my Blu-Ray player. What? Really? No language options for anything, and the entire program is in English.
Does anyone know of a decent free or reasonably priced option that can keep good video quality? I've heard that some other programs really mess up the video quality when they drop Bps down.
We are looking to make an AVHCD disc and a DVD quality disc for us with off-site backups (in-laws' house) like we do with our digital photos, and so that we have near original quality HD versions and then ones that we can play anywhere (parents' and in-laws' who don't have AVHCD capabilities).
Thanks!
