I know a fair amount about video, particularly old school analog video, but not a great deal about digital video. I shoot a lot now on a Nikon digital camera, saving on an SD card. When done, I stick the SD card into my computer and transfer the .mov files to my hard disk, then put them in Videopad to edit. That's my usual routine and I get fairly good results.
I noticed that my camera has a HDMI port on it, which I don't know a lot about, so I went on the web, and now I still don't know much about it. So my question is fairly simple: Would there be any advantage to transferring my files from the camera through the HDMI port to the computer? Would the resulting edits in Videopad look any better? It's hard for me to believe that an HDMI cable would transfer better quality signals to the computer then the SD card would. If an HDMI cable won't perform any better in this particular case, that's fine.
But if so, my computer has no HDMI port, so what would I need to do.to use one? Thanks!