I got my Panasonic TM700 a couple of weeks ago, thank you Sheldon. I haven't taken any serious video with it yet, I was hoping to get to use it on the Amalfi Coast and Sorrento this week, but our plans fell through when our flight was cancelled due to volcanic ash. I took a few minutes with it last Sunday on my way home along Sandymount Strand and by the Liffey. The weather was poor but what I really wanted to do was see the quality of the HD video and then try editing it with Premiere Pro CS4.
The highest quality setting on the TM700 is 1920 x 1080, 50p fps. However this takes up a lot of space and gives only over an hour of video. It's also very intensive on editing and my current TV can't show it. So I settled for a lower VBR of around 13mb per second and this allows about 5 and a half plus hours which would be fine for a couple of weeks on holiday.
My next problem was to be able to edit it on Premiere Pro. So I tried a few tracks of video with titles and tricky transitions to see how it managed. Happily I was able to preview the results particularly when I result to automatic quality. So I was able to edit it now would it render correctly, create small enough files and play back sharply, smoothly and without artifacts. This is when my trouble started. The playback was juddery and not smooth and some renditions create huge files. After many hours of experimentations and permutations I finally found settings that met all my requirements: small files, sharp clear video with clean transitions, no artifacts and smooth video.
Now all I need to go is create some masterpieces!