Cheap Creative Labs Vado HD 720p Pocket Video Camcorder with 8 GB Video Storage and 2x Digital Zoom (Black)

I purchased this camera (from Creative's website) for an urgent project I had to complete. It is easy to use and does create quality videos, but there are problems.

The AVI files that the camera creates do NOT play well with Windows-based third-party editing programs. And this problem was for both VGA movies as well as HD movies.

I use Corel VideoStudio Pro X2 on my Vista Ultimate PC. VideoStudio's editor could not preview these AVI files, which made editing very difficult. And the software was extremely slow and crashed often while working with the files.

So I downloaded some other video software, thinking it must just be the VideoStudio software.

Adobe Premiere Elements can't preview the files and can't seem to render them, either. Hit play and you'll see a black screen and hear your audio. I couldn't do a thing with the files there.

Pinnacle Studio rendered the files, sort of. The render was completely distorted and unusable.

Windows Movie Maker (comes with Vista Ultimate) was able to preview and render the AVI files, but crashed constantly while editing the files. If you save your project after each edit (before it crashes on the second edit), you can eventually get through it. It would NOT burn my final movie to DVD, however.

I finally realized it wasn't just the software or my PC, but rather the AVI files that this camera creates that was causing the problems. Do a search and you'll see many folks reporting the same issue. I was surprised not to see reviews mentioning this here at Amazon.

Creative's support is very bad. You can not speak to a live person on the phone, you can only email your problem in and they'll answer you in two days using broken English and ignoring the steps you said you've already taken. In fact, their first reply to me only said "we don't support third party tools." Well, duh! It was obviously a CODEC issue I was reporting.

I found a FAQ at their website that mentioned installing a third-party CODEC but that had NO EFFECT on the issue at all. The problems I experienced in the third-party tools remained.

Finally, I used the software that came with the camera (which is very very very basic) and saved the files to WMV format. From this point, I could import the WMV files to the other programs without a problem.

I'm not too sure this is a great workaround. This software is very lightweight. I'm not sure it can take a long movie and make that conversion without crashing, yet. I still need to try that.

If you're someone who will shoot a video and not want to cut it all up and put it back together, you won't have a problem. The software that comes with it will be fine. But if you actually want some control over the files, you will need a workaround like I mentioned.

I'm disappointed. I'm giving it three stars because the camera is great and it does shoot good videos. But I'm very unhappy with the workarounds needed to work on the files.Get more detail about Creative Labs Vado HD 720p Pocket Video Camcorder with 8 GB Video Storage and 2x Digital Zoom (Black).