Kaido, I am not that familiar with the terminology, so perhaps you can enlighten me on the complexities for transcoding.
I dont anticipate that we will be doing much if any video editing on my wife's G4. What I am looking for is the ability to essentially pull raw footage from my camcorder, archive it in whatever format the camcorder captures it in, and then set up a workflow for editing the files and converting to DVD...maybe Blu-Ray at some later point.
Can I take footage from the HF200, pull it to my PC and then edit the files directly? Or am I looking at having to transcode into another format regardless of whether or not I use a PC or MAC for video editing?
Okay, here's the basics: there are 3 primary video formats -
1. Recording format
2. Editing format
3. Playback format
Cameras record to a 'recording' format, which usually optimized for lots of information in a small space, i.e. to fit HD footage onto small memory cards. AVCHD, MOV, and AVI are some examples of recording formats. This is great for storing files while recording, but not so great for editing - computers aren't really cut out to edit those kinds of files (depends on which camera you have and what it records to though!) - editing AVCHD on most computers is super slow, even on a quad-core machine. So you have to translate the recorded file into something that the computer can use more easily. Think of it like converting a record to an MP3 - you plug it into your computer and translate the output from the record player into an MP3, so it's easier for you to use. Basically you use your video editing program or a standalone converter to convert your movie files from a recording format to an editing format. This process is known as "transcoding" (converting from one file format to another).
This is why figuring out your workflow before you start shooting is so important - each camera has a different recording format, and each video editing program can editing different video files. For example, the Final Cut Pro video editor for Mac doesn't like AVCHD files, but the Sony Vegas video editor for PC can handle AVCHD just fine. You can edit AVCHD files in Final Cut Pro, however, if you fill in the missing link by converting AVCHD into a video format that Final Cut Pro likes, like the ProRes format. So in Sony Vegas, you would shoot->edit. In Final Cut Pro, you would shoot->transcode->edit. But it all depends on your camera's format and the formats your video editor supports!
Then when you're all done, you convert it into the final format - a playback format. You can export it to DVD, to iPod, to Youtube, to Facebook, whatever you want. So think of it kind of like a chain - from your camera to your computer to wherever you want to play it back. It's a bit confusing at first, but once you figure out what camera you want and where you'll be doing the editing, it's pretty easy to nail it down. This is what stumps most people, and so most people spend a thousand dollars on a nice camera setup and never use it
AVCHD is a really good format for both shooting and storing video. It's much smaller than many other formats, which means you can back up your whole memory card and store it on your computer without using up a lot of space. If you use a video editing suite that supports AVCHD editing, then you don't have to transcode it before you edit, which saves a LOT of time.
So if you want to edit on a PC and get Sony Vegas, that supports AVCHD, so an AVCHD camcorder would be a good one to go with (like the HF200). You can use an AVCHD camcorder with iMovie on a Mac, but then you will have to transcode the AVCHD footage into something like MOV or iFrame, a format that iMovie understands, which adds lots of time to the editing process because you have to wait for your video clips to convert. If you don't want to do that, then you can get a different camera like that Sanyo that records in iFrame format and talks to iMovie natively, which is really nice.
It's not a bad thing to have to transcode because a lot of high-end cameras recording in formats that not many video editors can use natively. But if you want something really really easy - shoot then edit - then you'll want to match up your camera with your video editing program to facilitate that. For example, I have two cameras - a point & shoot that does 720p video and a MiniDV 1080p camcorder. My big 1080p camcorder records digitally to tape, then I import that and convert it into a usable format - it's a much longer process than my 720p camcorder, where all I do is drag the files from my memory card into iMovie and start editing. But my 1080p camcorder gives me way better quality and features, so it's worth the extra hassle of importing and transcoding.
So the questions you'll want to ask yourself are (1) where will I be doing most of my editing (PC or Mac, and which video software?), and (2) what kind of camera do I want? Transcoding is pretty much inevitable because you have to convert your edited movie into something to watch on Youtube or a DVD, so the part you can choose to skip is going from shooting to editing and transcoding inbetween. My 1080p camera gives me really fabulous quality, but I use my 720p camera nearly every day and my 1080p camera mostly only on weekends because the 720p camera is shoot->edit, whereas my 1080p camera is shoot->transcode->edit, which takes much more time and is more hassle to deal with.
Hope that clears it up