Importing Video from the Canon HV20 to Windows MovieMaker

If you recently purchased a Canon HV20 you might be a bit surprised when you go to try and use any of the High Definition video you recorded with it. Canon didn't bother to include software on the CD to actually use the video you record. You might try hooking up your camera to your Windows XP machine via Firewire but that won't get you very far either. All I was able to do was to get it to the point where it would transfer DV, which wasn't acceptable to me so I didn't even bother to see if it would work.

Instead I installed Windows Vista Ultimate on my desktop tonight. I installed my old Firewire card, hooked up the HV20 to the machine and I had Moviemaker importing video in no time, in HD even! I will let it import tonight and see what all I can do with the video in the morning. I have a tape with about an hour's worth of content on it, some of it for www.project240z.com so I hope to get that posted online tomorrow.

4 Comments

  • I can 't believe this. Do you mean that there is no way to get video from the HV20 to my PC if I don't want to run Window Vista and instead stick with XP?

  • I don't know Les, but I didn't have any luck

  • go to menu play of the HV20, just to "settings. 2 play / out" and I noticed that on the "DV out" there was a choice "DV DV lock" (instead of "HDV / DV" as it was set). I said to myself, let's make a last attempt, see if that works.
    I reconnected the cam to the laptop via firewire, put it in play ... et voila, my computer recognized the camera.
    I went to Movie Maker for a few seconds and test the acquisition is successful ...

  • "DV DV lock" (instead of "HDV / DV" , it's 576i instead of 1080i.
    Not good enough!!!

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