Since editing native AVCHD video requires a Supercomputer, are the requirements to edit a transcoded (Cineform) video the same? I'm planning to buy a laptop with a 2.00ghz Quad core, 4gb DDR3 RAM and a 1GB Geforce GT 130M video card and was wondering if I will be able to edit painlessly. Will transcoding degrade video quality? I would like to edit the clips at the same AVCHD resolution and hopefully quality. Are there any applications that transcode using Nvidia CUDA technology? Thanks.

If you have a recent nVidia video board that supports it, try Badaboom and see if it fits your needs, I think there is a free trial: Badaboom Media Converter - For Windows Vista or XP (http://nzone.com/object/nzone_badaboom_description.html) /Battle Vaughan/miamiherald.com video team

panasonic also offers a free AVCHD to DVCproHD transcoder, but with the specs you provided, i see no reason why you can't edit natively just fine.

Neoscene is OK and relatively cheap: it does produce AVIs which though very big, lower powered PCs can handle OK. You just need lots of scratch disk space. But Neoscene does downgrade the Dolby 5.1 tracks produced by most current HD consumer camcorders to stereo. Panasonic and Sony both provide DD5.1 these days, only poor old backward Canon doesn't.

I decided to go with a Dual Core 2.53ghz instead with the idea of transcoding then editing, and save money.

Neoscene is OK and relatively cheap: it does produce AVIs which though very big, lower powered PCs can handle OK. You just need lots of scratch disk space. But Neoscene does downgrade the Dolby 5.1 tracks produced by most current HD consumer camcorders to stereo. Panasonic and Sony both provide DD5.1 these days, only poor old backward Canon doesn't.

What is the ratio between raw AVCHD to Neoscene transcoded clips in terms of size? Are there any codecs that do not downgrade sound quality yet still producing high quality, workable clips?

If you use Vegas Pro8.0c you can edit native and keep all the sound tracks. It reduces the preview resolution if you want full frame rate or you can always up preview quality if your PC can manage.

Ron Evans

If you decode to full 1980 HD avi files in Cineform your files will be ~8x larger than the AVCHD source. Also if you have 5.1 sound on the AVCHD it will be switched to stereo in Cineform avi.

I use Prospect HD on 2.0 GHz dual core laptop with 1TB external RAID 0 drive. 2.0 GHz is below the standard recommended by Cineform but it seems to work fine - I am doing largely basic editing with the Prospect real time engine.

Main issue is Premiere CS3 has memory management weaknesses which the large Cineform files show up. But a workflow splitting up longer pieces into multiple projects gets round this.