How do download using 7 from AVCHD camera to computer?

Question

Hi,
Got Cannon VIXIA HG 20 camera and have installed Premiere Elements 7. Its a hard drive 60 GB camera I tried using GET Media, used the AVCHD button but the only drive that shows when I go to pull it off is the SDHC card. The hard disk drive does not show up to pull the video off of. When I use the ImageMixer3 softweare both drives show up.
Is there something I need to do to have the hard disk drive show up? tks

Answer 1

> The more I read about AVCHD the more I realize it's a lemon design.
It's not as bad as it sounds. The design gives way cheaper cameras with very good quality images. For example, the Canon HF-10 (under $600) is a memory-based model with an SDHC slot. The downside is that the internal memory (15Gb) will hold only two hours at the highest resolution, but that's more than I had on some tape-based DV camcorders. With a certain class of SDHC card, you can extend that to whatever the card can hold (I think 32Gn is the largest SDHC card so far?). It's a small and light (soda can size) camera with no moving parts and nice extras like a mic-in plug.
The pain with PE7 is that it doesn't see the camera's built-in memory - only the SDHC card, even though the OS sees both. So what I have to do is use the supplied software (Pixela SE) to download the files to my PC, or use the camera menus to move the files from the internal memory to the SDHC card, from where PE7 can pull it (or I can yank the card froim the camera and stick it directly into my PC card reader).
I've used camcorders for almost 30 years (Panasonic VHS, JVC VHS-C, Sony Eight) and liked my last - a JVC mini-DV model, but realized when I shot my daughters wedding last year and saw it on the big screen that it was time to move up to a higher-def camera. I'm not wealthy, so I was looking closely at price v. performance and that seemed to fall squarely in the AVCHD camp. Personally, I like the Canon form and wase of use as a camcorder, and can only hope that it isn't obsolete before Adobe get their act together.
- Robert