[Marjoline]

10 days ago I bought myself a SONY DCR-SR90E.
The internet and the seemingly knowledgeable salesman convinced me that it would be perfect for filming concerts, with good light sensitivity and wonderful sound.

Alas. It is all that, but it is a bit ahead of it's time. First thing I noticed after downloading the films is that WIndows Media Player, Quicktime and most others don't like surround-sound, the playback of the original roughs has massive interference. So I'd wanted to resort back to normal stereo, which the pc can handle. The camera does do stereo instead of the 5.1 surroundsound when the setting is on Easy Handycam. This is the setting for novices where you can't go wrong 'cause you can change nearly nothing. But if you need to film concerts at night, you may well need to change settings for the lighting etc. So you cannot be on Easy Handycam. Only then can you adjust all the settings... Ummm... :-( well... Yes you guessed it, all except the sound setting! Why o why, if the functionality is actually in the camcorder, why is it not made available in the menu? Did they simply forget, in the hurry to bring the camera onto the market?

So then, still not too nonplussed, we went trustingly back to the Imagemixer Software which came with the box, sure that Sony would have the solution there. But the Imagemixer software wouldn't show any thumbnail miniatures, so it was tough knowing what was wat. It had a button to convert from MPEG2/Dolby => normal stereo MPEG, but conversion is slow. And it will only convert one file at a time!!! So no chance of setting this slow system to work whilst we sleep, if we are to convert say 39 files, we will have to rise 39 times to select the next one! And to make matters even more grim, only the first 15 takes are visible in the Sony ImageMixer software, and the software hangs itself each time you try to progress to the next 15 files. At least for me it did.

So then back to the internet. The camcorder musn't be out there long in the shops, not much help to be found in english, but a very kind friend in France surfed around in France and Spain and found others had the same problem, searching high and wide to find software to edit this "mpeg2+dolby5.1" format that seems so hard to digest for the regular MPEG video tools at the moment.

In short, sure, you can take great video with this camera, but hopefully Sony will quickly bring out some new software that can handle these formats, or there will be more unhappy customers seeking comfort from others surprised in the same way. Because this is not cool, not being able to see the miniatures to select files, having this terrible distortion coming out of the speakers when trying to play the videos on the pc, not being able to easily edit the roughs, and no workaround to date, to avoid the problems the surround-sound gives. Otherwise a nice camcorder...

If anybody can point me the way out of this mess, I'll be grateful. Otherwise, I think I may bring the camera back. :-(

I can reccomend a low price editing programe Magix pro10 plus it has been updated to pro11 . I still prefer vesion 10 price about £25-£60 you can adjust the sound from either stereo or suround and adjust the direction left, right,back, or middle . Original a german programme dealing in audio,and then branched into video. I was thing of buying a camera like yours for the surround sound. Does the camcorder pick up camcorder motor noise

[Marjoline]

Hi, thanks Peter, I will check it out. No, the camera does not pick up motor noise as far as I can tell so far. They do warn not to release the zoom to quickly else it will be heard on the recording. As I film concerts, perhaps the motor noise if there were any would go unnoticed. I guess I'd have to film silence to find out. I'll let you know.

[Marjoline]

Well, I just checked out Magix, downloaded the demo but the import didn't work.... Not activated in the demo!
So then I checked out their forum, and found quite a bit of frustration there with the software: http://support.magix.net/boards/magi...howtopic=27294
I have mailed Magix for help, if I get it working and it seems to do the job after all I'll let you know.

[jomike]

The two best programs for editing mpeg2 IMO are Womble mpeg wizard and Ulead Videostudio 10+. Both handle AC3 5.1 sound (only the + version of VS10) and both do smart rendering. VS10+ has more features but is trickier to set up to do smart rendering. I don't know Magix, but have heard that it can also do smart rendering.
If your PC won't play AC3 5.1 sound, you probably don't have the correct audio codec installed. Try this one:
http://ac3filter.net/index.php?name=...rticle&artid=1

Regards, Mike