Brian Flint

About 12 years ago I did a lot of home movies of family using a Canon Camcorder with a DV tape. I bought a Firewire card, IEEE 1394, and fitted into my PC. With suitable cable from Camcorder to PC I transferred the recordings to the Hard Drive on my PC. This resulted in .avi file  720 x 576 , 25.00 fps , Data rate 28887kbps. Interlaced. In some cases I had 'wide screen PAL' ie 16 by 9 and in other cases I had 4 by 3 ( widescreen not selected when recording ). Back then I decided to transcode the .avi to mpg files suitable to burn onto DVD . The bit rate drops to around 6Mbps and I kept the frame rate at 25 fps interlaced. This gave good results for a family movie. A year or so ago, I decided that DVDs are not future proof and I need to make the footage be 16 by 9 with black bars either side if original was 4 by 3 and use progressive scan - ie de-interlace and use a resolution of 1920 x 1080. I felt the biggest problem was the de-interlacing of fast moving image - ie children running about. There is also another problem I find today and that there is difficulty to find an Editor which will accepting the original .avi files. Resolve 16 does not accept it.  Anyway I have managed one way or another to make the format to what I want, but I may have not choose the best way to do it. When I show the footage to my grandchildren they just see the content and couldn't care about the finer details of the quality.

About 12 years ago I did a lot of home movies of family using a Canon Camcorder with a DV tape. I bought a Firewire card, IEEE 1394, and fitted into my PC. With suitable cable from Camcorder to PC I transferred the recordings to the Hard Drive on my PC. This resulted in .avi file  720 x 576 , 25.00 fps , Data rate 28887kbps. Interlaced. In some cases I had 'wide screen PAL' ie 16 by 9 and in other cases I had 4 by 3 ( widescreen not selected when recording ). Back then I decided to transcode the .avi to mpg files suitable to burn onto DVD . The bit rate drops to around 6Mbps and I kept the frame rate at 25 fps interlaced. This gave good results for a family movie. A year or so ago, I decided that DVDs are not future proof and I need to make the footage be 16 by 9 with black bars either side if original was 4 by 3 and use progressive scan - ie de-interlace and use a resolution of 1920 x 1080. I felt the biggest problem was the de-interlacing of fast moving image - ie children running about. There is also another problem I find today and that there is difficulty to find an Editor which will accepting the original .avi files. Resolve 16 does not accept it.  Anyway I have managed one way or another to make the format to what I want, but I may have not choose the best way to do it. When I show the footage to my grandchildren they just see the content and couldn't care about the finer details of the quality.

About 12 years ago I did a lot of home movies of family using a Canon Camcorder with a DV tape. I bought a Firewire card, IEEE 1394, and fitted into my PC. With suitable cable from Camcorder to PC I transferred the recordings to the Hard Drive on my PC. This resulted in .avi file  720 x 576 , 25.00 fps , Data rate 28887kbps. Interlaced. In some cases I had 'wide screen PAL' ie 16 by 9 and in other cases I had 4 by 3 ( widescreen not selected when recording ). Back then I decided to transcode the .avi to mpg files suitable to burn onto DVD . The bit rate drops to around 6Mbps and I kept the frame rate at 25 fps interlaced. This gave good results for a family movie. A year or so ago, I decided that DVDs are not future proof and I need to make the footage be 16 by 9 with black bars either side if original was 4 by 3 and use progressive scan - ie de-interlace and use a resolution of 1920 x 1080. I felt the biggest problem was the de-interlacing of fast moving image - ie children running about. There is also another problem I find today and that there is difficulty to find an Editor which will accepting the original .avi files. Resolve 16 does not accept it.  Anyway I have managed one way or another to make the format to what I want, but I may have not choose the best way to do it. When I show the footage to my grandchildren they just see the content and couldn't care about the finer details of the quality.

I am retired now but have experience over many years as an electronic design engineer.
If there are 'timers' employed in the design then it is likely they would 'reset' to a zero or starting count state when the power is removed and then returned to  electronics. This would occur when the battery is removed. for a short period..
However if Canon was clever they could continuously write the count value of the timer(s) to a non-volatile memory  and when the power is resumed ( after battery removal ) the values of the count stored in the non-volatile memory could be returned to the timer(s). To do this there would have to be some non-volatile memory in the camera.
 

It should be noted that 720x480 is 1.5 to 1 , and 640x480 is 1.333 to 1. So converting from one to the other means black bars must appear somewhere if you don't stretch the original image.
I have converted some old SD interlaced footage in the PAL format. An some of it was widescreen PAL where the pixels are nowhere square ( can't remember the ratio ) but the result is a 16 by 9 image from SD which has ( in PAL ) 720 x 625.
I wanted to put my old footage ( family movies etc ) made on a DV recorder ( PAL) into a non interlaced ( ie progressive ) format which I felt would be more future proof. I tried various things , but in the end I just put the SD footage into an editor and set the output to be 1920x1080 ( progressive ) and kept the frame rate the same. Davinci Resolve will not accept interlaced video , so I used handbrake to do this conversion. This would result in a image which had black bars at the sides. I would then if necessary stretch the image so that it was as original . I would try and find a circular object in the image and make it round . I found that Davici Resolve was useful for this as it allowed the x to y ratio to be fine tuned. I would still have black bars at the sides but at least people did not look fat or thin. I don't know if any of this helps , but that is what I do.

I think a lot of people with their new GH5 will have problems trying to edit their 4K ( UHD ) h.264 4:2:2 10bit files. 
I downloaded the latest version of DaVinci Resolve 12.5.5.026 and it will not recognize this file. My Windows Media ( Windows 10 ) will not play this file, although other video players such as VLC will.