[jws]

Don't you think there is a different license for commercial encoders? That commercial license probably comes with a stunning set of fees outlined in byzantine detail, hence the need to keep businesses from using the consumer license.

(I think the professional camera crowd doesn't do interframe compression in the camera anyway. It makes editing a little funny and they like very high quality source material. Google shopping for "video camera h.264" over $1000 only brought me a bunch of security camera packages.

The Canon Vixia HF S21 is over $1000 and contains the prohibition (well, the MPEG-2 version of it), sadly I can not paste it here because Canon set the no-copy bit on the downloadable PDF manual! Yes! That will defend the company from the evil threat of… umm… I can create no scenario where copying from the users' manual is a threat.)

[nitrogen]

Adobe Reader isn't the only PDF-viewing software out there.

[wmf]

I agree that the whole "non-professional" thing seems blown out of proportion. After you've shot and edited your masterpiece, run it though a "professional" encoder and you're done.

[please]

Look for Canon 5D Mark II, it uses h264 and is used for commercial film production

[frw]

I work part-time for a production company and as far as I know, the industry standard is the RED Camera http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RED_Digital_Cinema, whose standard output is 2K-4K RAW.

Compressed formats that interpolate between keyframes (like MPEG) are generally a bad idea since they make precise cutting between clips a lot harder.