Rather than take both my dv camcorder and my stills camera on holiday, I intend to take only my Sony NEX 5 which records to a SDHC memory card. Ii gives me a choice of file formats for recording movies: mp4 or avchd. In the past I have recored in avchd, loaded these in to a project and then converted them to avi before dropping them into my movies. As PE 8 doesn't handle HD very well, the files are very large and, as I don't have anything to play HD on, is there any point in recording in the avchd format? Am I going to get really poor quality recording in mp4? I have done a test run with both and converted them to avi and on my pc screen they both look similar quality. Any movies I make will be exported both as avi for viewing on my pc and onto DVD for viewing on a tv screen. Am I ok with mp4 and do I have a choice of standard or widescreen in this format?
I also have a question about project settings which I will post as a separate thread.
Regards
ps am I in the correct forum?