Capturing Canon HF20 video in windows 7 64bit

[alaskamovieguy]

Up until now my pixela image mixer 3 SE software that came with my canon hf 20 captured the video to my computor just fine, that was on my old windows XP O.S. Now I'm running a windows 7 64 bit and although it does capture it's extremely slow. Checking around the web a bit it seems the software doesn't actually work on windows 7. Any good capture software out there that might do the job?

[Gerlinde]

Have you tried using PRE? I'm not familiar with your camera, but I think you would use the Hard Disk, Flash Memory Camcorders 1080i 30 project preset.

[Steve Grisetti]

Also note that the HF20 is an AVCHD camcorder. You should not be capturing this video to your computer if you plan to edit it with another program.

With AVCHD, the video files are merely moved from the camcorder to your computer using some sort of video importer or media downloader. (You can even do it using Windows Explorer in a pinch.) As Gerlinde says, Premiere Elements comes included with a Get Media/Video Importer tool designed for doing just that.

What program are you planning to edit this video with? Most likely it has an importer built into it.

[Chuck Engels]

Like Steve says...
All you should have to do is move the files from the camera to your hard drive with Windows Explorer.
Then you add the video to your project using the "From Files and Folders" option like you always have.
There really isn't any need to "capture" the video as it is already in digital format on a hard drive or memory card.
That's all I have to do with the files from my GE DV1, same format as yours, AVCHD.

[alaskamovieguy]

Ive tried using windows explorer to copy/paste from my HF20 to the computor. It's incredably slow!, like 45 mins for a 15 sec video. When I was using the image_transfer software supplied with the camera ( imagemixer 3 SE ), the same file would take about 5-10 seconds on my old windows XP which is a much slower system than I have now. I had issues trying it thru my editing program ( PE 7 ) as well. I still have the old computor set up and it works fine to transfer files thru it to a external drive and then transfer them to the new computor but obvisouly I shouldn't have to do that. Checked with the Canon website for drivers etc. and nothing available there. Thinking about downloading service pak 1 and misc. other noncritical updates wondering if that might be a remedy. Any other ideas?

[Steve Grisetti]

Have you tried using Premiere Elements' Get Media/From Flip, AVCHD and Hard Disk Camcorder tool and the Video Importer to move your files from the camcorder to your computer?

It will take time -- but it shouldn't be excessive. I've no idea why your new computer is downloading from your camcorder so slowly. I've never heard of that before!

Maybe someone else can look over your configuration and see if your set-up (the RAID configuration for instance) is counter-productive.

[alaskamovieguy]

I have tried that Steve. So slow it brings tears to your eyes. When I plug the camera into the computor with the supplied mini usb cable and open 'computor' to locate it, it seems as thou it wants to take an excessively long time trying to read whats on the camera and eventually shows the built in camera harddrive and the removeable care.When you click on either of them a very slow progress bar appears at the top, sometimes the whole thing just stalls out 'not responding'. It is definitly related to windows 7 as it works just fine on the old XP. Ive also installed the very latest version of the Pixela Image Mixer software that canon supplies with their cameras which said it addresses some issues of windows 7 running slow, but no luck there.

[Steve Grisetti]

And you have tried downloaded from camcorder directly to your C drive also -- just to see if the issue is unique to your second or external drives?