FCE, Sony HD Camera, Family Video Editing, & Burning (HD?)DVD

Question

Ok. Here goes ... I am a new iMac enthusiast who has "seen the light". That being said, I will be purchasing my first iMac in 30 days and I am hopefull that my expectation(s) do not fall flat because they are unrealistic. The only expectation in which there appears to be some doubt is this ... I am planning to convert all of my family videos (present formats of VHS, VHS-C, & AVCHD) to a HD format on a DVD, or at least to another electronic hardware such as a hard drive or a library of SD cards. Well, how many holes do I have in my plan? Before you answer, allow me to tell you my understanding of the barriers. First of all the actual conversion of VHS format to a digital format. I do have a Plextor Digital Video Converter with which I have, in the past, successfully converted the analog VHS format to a digital format and saved on a Windows PC, so I do have some experience with that effort. I do understand the labor intensive exercise this could prove to be. Second, I anticipate the VHS-C conversion to be about the same process. However, what about the video that I presently have on my Sony HDR-SR11? I have already done some importing and editing of said digital video via my daughter's MacPro & iMovie, but what about burning it to DVD? Of course, when I burned the video to DVD it converted to standard format. I want it to be in a HD format. From what I have seen in forums and various discussions on the net, this is almost impossible without some relatively complicated manipulation via Toast 10, BluRay drive, etc. type effort. What is the deal? Why the black hole of interface when it comes to burning digital video to a HD format, even when the original source is HD? It seems to me that there is a huge opportunity for Apple to capture a tremendous segment of business by providng an "Apple-like" seemless process of conveting (AVC)HD video and enabling the burning (archiving) of such video to a digital disk in either iMovie or FCE or whatever, be it a DVD or SD card.
Ok ... back to my question. Is the gap as large as I understand it to be? Is there no other way to accomplish this task? Is FCE a viable option and/or tool in this effort or not? Am I better off using Toast 10 or is that not even the answer? Help!

Answer 1

Hi and welcome to the forum!
I think your expectations are on the whole very realistic, and FCE would certainly help in what you seem to be wanting to do. For converting old VHS tapes, an analog to DV converter will do the trick. You simply plug in the converter to your camera, and it should convert the analog to a DV format that you can capture directly into FCE with the DV Converter preset to make things easier for you.
As for using AVCHD, FCE does not edit it natively but will convert it upon ingest to Apple Intermediate Codec for editing natively. Not much quality is lost in this conversion, and the Log and Transfer interface within FCE that you use to ingest AVCHD from your camcorder is top notch.
The thing you have to understand about HD-DVDs is that they are very costly to produce and view, with a rather small viewer base. It is possible as you said to burn HD DVDs using Toast or the DVD Studio Pro that comes with Final Cut Studio. Even then you would need a separate Blue-ray disc burner to hook up to your computer, the expensive HD discs themselves, and an HD DVD reader to hook up to your HD TV. I guess the reason why iDVD does not offer HD DVD burning is that there are a relatively small amount of people who require it or have the funds to make it work smoothly. Very few people have HD DVD readers in their homes anyway, so you can be assured that most DVDs you would burn would be played solely on your machine.
Do not give up hope! SD DVDs still preserve pretty good quality, are easy to use with the software installed on the Mac, and are assured to play on the majority of TVs owned by people today. If you are bent on getting the HD to work for your TV, Ian's helpful post on [viewing HD videos|http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10506824&#10506824] with an inexpensive media player might make more sense for you.
So all in all, FCE is a viable tool for most things you would like to do with video. However, if you are sure you want to burn to HD DVDs you will need other software and equipment than what comes with your Mac.