I am trying to edit AVCHD footage from a Canon VIXIA hg20 in vegas 8. The footage plaback is awful; slow frame rate. The audio plays fine. I thought it was my graphics card so I just upgraded that and it didnt help.

Do I need to upgrade my CPU? Can you upgrade a CPU or do you need a whole motherboard?

Current System:
Windows XP Home, SP2
Pentium 4 3.0GHz
1.5 gb RAM
ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro AGP graphics card

The frustrating part is that sony recommends 2.8 GHz for HD video, and I am running 3. How can this be the issue? Does anybody else have this proiblem? Thanks

Sony's recommendation is for HDV, not AVCHD.
From what I've read, a quad core is the minimum requirement for this particular format.
You might be able to get away with it on your machine by using AVCHD UpShift (http://www.newbluefx.com/avchd-upshift.html) from the folks at New Blue FX/VASST.
It's $49 and a trial version is available.

AVCHD plays ok on my pc with vegas.
Quad core q6600, 4gb ram, vista.
I can multicam the AVCHD with ex1 footage also, still plays smooth.

Paul.

AVCHD is different than HD. It has a much more complex compression type than other HD codecs. AVCHD makes even some of the speediest quad core chips choke. Vegas does not utilize the video card for processing of the footage - entirely on the CPU.

Time for a new system. Or you can try transcoding to a intermediate codec. Maybe that will help.

It's going to be rough going on a single core...

Lower your preview window to the lowest possible resolution... not the lowest you can tolerate, the LOWEST PERIOD... work up a bit and see if you can deal with the results.

More RAM helped my laptop a bit, but not much. Made it BARELY usable for some AVCHD... not something I'd like to do much of.

Dual core is better, but for AVCHD consider a Quad core upgrade, I've got a Q6600 on a cheap-o MB, and it's not bad.

You didn't spec your Disk subsystem, but newer faster drives with good throughput are a good idea, especially if you don't have a bunch of RAM, and there's a whole lotta swappin' goin' on.

You can also go Cineform too.

I'll second the Cineform recomendation... Get the video out of AVCHD and into a completely different format with as absolutely little loss in quality possible. Cineform is definately the way to go here.

You should still upgrade your system to a Quad Core machine though.. :)

Jon

Hey, thanks everybody for the helpful feedback. I guess it is time to upgrade my system. Quad Core? Yikes! Two years ago my processor was hot stuff.

I think I'll try the cineform recommendation. I would have never went AVCHD if I knew this was going to happen. Good thing I upgraded my personal equipment before my business. Lesson learned.