We have three Panasonic HDC-SD9 videocams. They seem to work OK but they record the video in a novel format that isn't the easiest for us to work with. What's more, the software that comes with the videocams is useless. I hope the following information will help people to make the most of the videocams.
The easiest way is to take the SD card out of the videocam and stick it into the corresponding slot on one of the teacher laptops. Then the SD card will show up as a drive on the laptop, just like a USB drive would. You can then copy the video from the SD card to your computer (search for the files that look like 00001.mts). Please don't put the video in your "My Documents" folder because that will cause us quickly to run out of space on the file server.
The videocam records in a format called AVCHD. This gives files having an MTS extension (e.g. 00001.mts).
Currently the two most common video players on the PC, Windows Media Player and QuickTime Player, don't play .mts files. We can install a free player called VLC Media Player that will play the videos.
Currently we aren't able to convert the video to a different format. We could potentially buy software that would let us do that.
Currently we aren't able to edit the video - cutting scenes together, adding sound etc. If it is decided that this is important then we would need to buy software for this purpose.