Monday, June 27, 2011

Its all about allowing the possibility . . . . .

Last December, couple of months after our daughter was born, we decided to get a HD camcorder and after some consultation with Dr. Google we narrowed down on a specific model of Canon. All the reviews said, the hardware is really good but the software is a piece of crap and most everything I looked at said “Canon should do a better job”. By the time the device came home I was convinced beyond reason that the software is junk.

To follow the procedure, I went ahead and installed the Imagemixer software provided with the camcorder on to my PC and it worked beautifully to transfer videos from the camcorder to the PC. The next step was to play on the TV, Canon went cheap here and doesn’t provide a HDMI cable but will provide a component cable (that for me is plain dumb). Like many of the Hi-def camcorders out there, Canon records the videos in AVCHD format which my Samsung TV doesn’t understand.

I went back to the installed software to see if there is a way to convert the video to a format that the TV understands. Once I clicked on “Edit”, the software went limbo and it completely disappeared from the screen. I was convinced, this is the reason everybody calls the software junk and went around looking for other video converters and editors. I have been trying for the last 6 months to see if I can find a good converter/editor and none of the so called good ones did any good, either they would hang or they would produce an inferior quality video and so on or they were too expensive and complicated to use.

I was so negative about the software that,  I had stopped using Canon provided software to play HD videos on the PC and was trying to use Windows media player and Picasa to play HD videos (which was a dumb thing to do) and had concluded that my PC is slow and need upgrading.  

It was not till last week when I changed my mind to consult Dr. Google with the symptoms I have been having with the Imagemixer software. It took less than couple of hours (thanks to this obscure forum) and I found out what was going wrong with the Imagemixer software. Apparently I had installed K-Lite codec (pretty good to play AVI files which Real Player and  others refuse to play) and it is not compatible with Canon provided software.

Once I uninstalled the K-Lite, the Imagemixer worked like a champ. I could see all my videos in one place, edit them (have only tried trim and nothing fancy), add music, text and upload all such good stuff. The integrated video player plays the 1080p video flawlessly (enough horse power in the PC). It still doesn’t do the conversion to different formats but the Blu-ray player we now own understands the AVCHD and that problem is solved.             

Looking back, I could have achieved this result long time ago, but I was so convinced that the software is bad that I did not allow for the possibility of getting it to work. Once I allowed for the possibility then it took minutes to get the problem fixed.     

PS: Keep in mind, HD videos mean ton of storage and both cores on my PC gets pegged when playing HD videos, but the quality makes it all worth it

No comments: