Got a Sony HDR-SR12 camcorder the other day

So I picked up a Sony HDR-SR12 camcorder the other day and am starting to use it. I've owned the first small Sony HDV camcorder, the HDR-HC1, when it first came out in 2005 but sold it later since I felt the low light performance was lacking as compared to my other Sony HDR-FX1 (larger) 3CCD cam. The SR12 is the smallest of the three, and now I only have the AVCHD-based SR12 and my 3-year old FX1 HDV2 [tape] format camcorders. For editing I have been using Avid Liquid, though it supports the HDV workflow very well, it does not yet support workflow for AVCHD (it probably won't until the next gen version). Read more below...

The primary difference between HDV and AVCHD formats are that the HDV2 format is a constant bit rate MPEG-2 stream at 1440x1080i meant for miniDV tapes, while AVCHD is a subset profile of the MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 standard, and works best from what I can see at 1920x1080i on this SR12 at the moment at the SR12's highest bitrate, 16Mbps. Also, the AVCHD format contains up to Dolby Digital 5.1, where as HDV only has 2 channels for stereo. So as it looks like Avid Liquid may not get support for AVCHD, I am going on a quest to find an editor that can, with speed, edit both HDV2 native and AVCHD native (assuming the frame size is compatible) together on the same timeline. Sony Vegas has some support for this though I just downloaded their trial so I'll have to do some testing with that. Until next time. In the meantime I'll be loading up the 120GB drive in the SR12 with lots of weird footage that will be good for video experimentation. It is a quite powerful to have such a tiny camera (compared to the HDR-FX1) with great video quality at it's highest quality setting and be able to record up to 15 hours on it right in the cam. Then back it out to a USB drive as a backup. I've already burned a number of Blu-ray discs with my 2x writer with HDV2 footage from the Sony FX1 and the previous HC1 and it looks stunning on a 52" Samsung 1080p LCD, played from a Sony Playstation 3 (could probably have guessed that :-). More experimentation to come. Then on to fixing up my music production stuff which is a mess.