"I am considering buying a Lumix DMC-FT1. I want to be able to still use Movie Maker on Windows. Will I be able to do so with AVCHD-Lite which the camera records video in?"
AVCHD-Lite, which is a subset of the AVCHD format popularized by hard disk camcorders from Sony, Panasonic, and Canon, uses h.264 video coupled with AAC audio for recording movies. Neither of these two codecs is directly supported by Windows Movie Maker in either Windows XP or Windows Vista. There are 3rd-party solutions that work with varying degrees of success in allowing you to work with AVCHD video in both versions of Movie Maker, but for the most part you are safer in assuming AVCHD and AVCHD-Lite will not work with either the XP or Vista versions of Movie Maker. If you are willing to convert the files to WMV or MPEG-2 before editing, you have more options, but generally speaking if you need to convert the AVCHD video before editing, you are better off starting with an editing program designed to edit AVCHD. You have several choices you can make as alternative editors.




