I have bought several of these and they work really good. 

Good deal on HF high capacity battery $29.95

This battery does not report the usage to the camera but otherwise works better than the Canon battery.

Note 2008.12.10 - Hardware for Playing MTS

I have now been experimenting with the Cannon MTS files on several machines and display programs. I can now say for sure you need a powerful machine to display these 1920 x 1080 files. My main graphics machine is a AMD 5000 2.5gh quad core processor, 2 gigs of memory, with a 512meg Video card,running on XP. This machine displays these files flawlesly. I have another machine with an AMD 4600, 2.3gh dual core processor, 1 gig of memory, using the Video on the motherboard which is sharing the ram, running XP. This machine loses sync between the video and sound although the video does display without halting. We tried a machine using an Intel 2.5gh, 1 gig of memory, using the video on the motherboard, running Vista and the video halted and fell out of sync and was not viewable. This being said it appears you need plenty of ram:, a high powered video card and if your using Vista I am not sure what you need.

This is a first production using our new Cannon HF10 camera:

These are the steps used in the production process with a list of the software used:

MTShandler - Files downloaded from chip

AVS Video Converter 6 – Conversion of MTS files to uncompressed AVI

TMPGenc – Editing of clips and extraction of single frames

TMPGenc - Conversion to cropped 720x480 standard DVD format 

MHpicpan - Panning and zooming of stillframes

Video Wave 4.1 – Construction of storyboard clips and transitions

TMPGenc – Conversion of Clips to MPEG2

TMPGenc tools – Joining of Clips into production

Goldwave – Creation of audio .wav file

TMPGenc – Conversion of .wav file to .mp2

TMPGenc tools – Muxing of sound track with MPEG

Using displaying and copying MTS files:

We have recently aquired Cannon HF100 and HF10 cameras.  The software that came with the camera was absolute junk so I have spent about a week now figuring out how I am going to utilize the output of these devices.  

The video on these cameras is saved to flash memory and due to the limitations of this type of device  the video is encoded to a format called MTS which is a  special variant of MPEG type 2.  I spent a couple of days writing a player and file transfer piece of software and I now have a program which I presently called MTShandler.exe.  I tried numerous players and I found the quality of the play back of each to be highly variable with some just awfull.  I used Vis .NET 2005 so that users that have not updated to Framework3.5 would be able to use the program.  The program itself uses the axmediaplayer included with the compiler which relies upon the existence of the Windows Media Player.  I have installed the updated Media Player 11 on my system.  The video play back is really spectacular from the 1920x1080 camera files played from the chip or the copy on the hard drive.

The file transfer in the beginning I did with the main program thread but since this transfer from a 16gb chip to the hard drive can be quite time consuming.  Luc Pattyn suggested that running such a long copy process on the main thread of the program in not wise and suggested I invoke a BackGroundWorker  process to carry out the copying.  This work has now been completed and I have a good piece of software for copying and viewing these files.        

Editing the MTS files:

 I like working in avi during the production process as there is less file degradation while we do transitions, titles, fades etc.  Not all avi's are good however as there is a big difference between the various compression schemes.  Many times we use uncompressed avi's despite the fact they run almost 8gb/minute.  I would like to see a converter offer a choice of compressions but most important of all is an uncompressed option.

File conversion

                                  Warning Warning Warning

                                         Avoid AVS4You

I have been going around with these people for over two months now and I still do not have a working piece of software.  The scenario below keeps repeating.

Xilisoft Conversion Program - 

I have recently bought software from Xilisoft to do file conversions and I am quite happy with it.  It converts to HD AVI's that are recognized by TMPGenc. With my new quad core Phenom it encodes four files at the same time.  The interface is clean and easy to understand.  Most importantly it does not require internet access to activate. 

 Editing the AVI clips

Once I have the files converted to AVI I can use a piece of software called TMPGenc to edit the AVI files.  This program we have relied upon for many years for doing our Video editing.  Since we can process the files and reprocess the files many times without incurring any file degredation.  The use of this program is a complex subject beyond the scope of this text but its features are numerous.  You can edit in and outpoints, crop and resize frames, rework the sound track, color correct and when you have acheived what you desire encode to DVD complient MPEG2 files.  The clips can then be joined into chapters for a DVD.

Archiving flash chips while traveling

Friend Martin is leaving for Argentina in two weeks with his new Canon HF10 video camera. He is armed with 8 – 8gb chips which at a reasonable resolution will give him 16 hours of video and he wanted to get a laptop to download the chips. This sounds good but since the 8 chips = 64 gb and a good laptop has maybe 160 gb of storage this is an expensive non solution. I suggested an alternative of using a large capacity USB drive which he could use to download his chips. Being Martin is not too computer savvy I am loading CameraDownloader on the USB so that he can display the MTS files and download the chips. After the chips are down loaded they can be be re initialized in the camera as “format” in Windows does not work.