Sony HDR-CX520V Review
The good: Compact design; first-rate video quality and performance; geotagging videos is fun, if limited.
The bad: No SD card support; awkward control layout; no wind filter; no manual shutter speed, iris, or audio controls; expensive.
The bottom line: The geotagging capability remains mostly a novelty, but the top-notch video quality of the Sony Handycam HDR-CX500V and HDR-CX520V make them worthy options. Because internal memory is overpriced, the HDR-XR500V is the better deal of the two, though you may want to opt for a 2010 model that supports SD cards rather than Sony’s Memory Stick.
- Read More: CNET.com
How to Lossless Join, Cut, Edit Sony CX520V AVCHD MTS on Mac
“Urgent please! I am making a school video presentation but I recorded from a HD camera (Sony Handycam CX520V)…it captured in AVCHD format but I can’t play it on my Mac or convert it. Someone please help! It was such a good movie, and my school project is due in 8 hours!”
As a training consultant and media producer, I use lots of tools for multimedia processing. Adobe Premiere and Sony Vegas should be the top video editors for professionals, but for novice and people that want but cutting and encoding AVCHD contents, I would recommend the Pavtube Media Magician for Mac. It features basic video editing capacity and servers as a “nice camcorder assistant manager, lossless camcorder video joiner, MTS/ M2TS/ MXF/ MOV/ MKV/ TiVo/ WMV/ AVI/ MPG converter and editor, and efficient camcorder video uploader for YouTube”. Most important, it keeps perfect audio and video sync.
Here I demonstrate the simple steps for Sony CX520V AVCHD editing with Media Magician for Mac. Hope it helps video editing beginners get started with AVCHD clipping and editing for education presentation and home film. If you work on Windows, get Media Magician for your computer. The steps are almost the same.
Mac AVCHD Editing Guide: from Camera recordings to Presentation
Step 1. Connect your camcorder (say Sony Handycam CX520V) to Mac/PC with USB 2.0 cable, or use a card reader to connect Flash Memory card to computer. Download AVCHD videos from camcorder to computer with Media Magician. Run Pavtube Media Magician and the app will automatically detect your Sony Handycam CX520V AVHCD camcorder. Follow the wizard to import/back up AVCHD .m2ts video to Media Magician for Mac library.
Step 2. Edit videos in timeline. Drag and drop the AVCHD videos from library to timeline. Here you can remove unwanted .m2ts, trim AVHCD video by frame-accurate, put them into the right order for merging into one film and set special effects (3D effect included).
Step 3. Choose “Output” on the top of main interface to switch it to output interface. In output interface you can set common video format (AVI, WMV, MOV, etc) for using in presentation, authoring DVD, uploading to YouTube, and exporting to iPad, iPhone, Android tablets, etc. There are also intermediate codec for further editing in Adobe and Avid software, which I like.
Step 4. Choose a format for school presentation. For importing Sony Handycam footage to Keynote, follow the steps to use proper format:
1. Move your mouse to Common Format tab, click on it.
2. Select “AVI”, “MP4” or “MOV” format.
3. Set desired quality in av parameters. For instance, to export SD video, you can set Video “Size” to “640*480” and bitrate to “1000kbps”. For better quality, set “Size” to “1280*720” and “Bitrate” “2000kbps” or above.
Tip: For people who feel like compressing Sony AVCHD video to iPad or Android device, choose “Device” tab and select respective preset for your device. There are hundreds of presets for different tablets, smartphones and various kinds of media players.
Step 5. Convert educational videos to AVI/WMV for slideshow. Press the plus sign (+) to add task for conversion. Select the task(s) and click on the triangle sign to start encoding Sony Handycam CX520V M2TS video to AVI/WMV common file type.
After conversion, you can transfer videos to FCP, AVID, Youtube etc…
- How to uploading AVCHD/MTS videos to YouTube
- How to import Media contents to FCP X/iMovie/FCE/AVID
- How to stream MKV/M2TS to WD TV Live Plus for playback
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