We have an older Canon FS200 camcorder that works reasonably well for our purposes. It stores video on SDHC cards in ".mod" format (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOD_and_TOD), which is essentially an mpeg2 file. The tricky part is that the camcorder records a wide screen (16:9) video that is letterboxed in an SD (4:3, 480p) frame. It is all too easy to convert the .mod files into an mp4 video that has a letterboxed video in a 16:9 frame, which means that the wide-format video has been stretched even wider.
Should one upload such an overly-stretched video to YouTube, it turns out that it is remarkably easy to fix on YouTube. YouTube allows the playback of the uploaded video to be modified through "formatting tags": https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/146402?hl=en. Adding the "yt:stretch=4:3" tag undoes the extra stretching (adding "pillarbox" bars on the sides of the video), while the "yt:crop=16:9" tag removes the pillar- and letter-boxing bars to show just the 16:9 video in a 16:9 frame.
Whew!
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