Help with new Panny TM-900 and 1080/50i

py6km

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At the risk of posting something which may have come up before (even though I couldn't find anything similar that had been asked), I'd like to ask for some advice from the more seasoned users.

I have pretty much no experience with camcorders or video editing. However, I now have a Panasonic TM-900, which seems decent and relatively future proof machine (at least for a year!). It has lots of blurb plastered in the manual about not using the 1080/50p mode as you may run into trouble when editing. I'm probably happy enough using 1080/50i.

I have iMovie, and it appears to be able to import and allow me to play with video at this resolution. Just whilst playing, I exported a clip for quicktime, and the quality (when viewed on my MacBook Pro screen) appeared less than 1080/50i - it was perfectly ok, except there seemed to be some compression artefacts in some locations. I have yet to fiddle the QT output settings, so am hoping that I can rectify this myself.

However, my question (thank you for reading this far), is - would there be a better alternative for me than iMovie? I'm not really interested in something with a large learning curve, but am willing to spend some time with a new app if it will allow me to output at a quality which doesn't obviate the point of having the camcorder. Clips will likely be put on the web (my own website) at high quality, or put on an Apple TV (which I have yet to get) for viewing on the telly. So, nothing major really. I won't be burning Blu-Rays as I have no burner for that, and can't seem me getting one unless they happen to get built into Apple machines anytime soon.

If iMovie is the best choice, that's fine by me. I just want to make sure that I can get the best output possible given my apathy for learning how to use (and buy) something like Final Cut. Does iMovie support 1080/50p, and if it does is there any benefit for me given my rather tardy use of the footage?

Thanks!
 
Apples H.264 encoder is not very good, x264 is one of the best H.264 encoders out there if you wish to re-encode the video. There are x264 plugins for Quicktime but I dont know if you can use it with iMovie.

Then there are standalone x264 encoders like Handbrake which has an OSX version of course but it not an editor so any material should be edited before hand then outputted lossless in original format if possible before being fed into Handbrake for conversion.
 
I thought that the whole thing would be a lot more straightforward to be honest. iMovie seems to attempt to be a jack of all trades, but I'm concerned about the whole conversion thing - if it throws out some data I may as well have got a cheaper camcorder. Perhaps I should look into Premiere Pro or similar.
 

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