I'm stepping from still photography into the world of video. I've been playing around on the web to find all the info that I can. I have a question about the HF line of cameras and Final Cut Pro. The Final Cut Pro website doesn't show that these cameras are compatible. From what I've gathered it's because they record in AVCHD. What does one need to do to make the files usable in FCP?

Apple's standard procedure is transcoding into ProRes (or AIC in FCE) and editing those files.

You could also use Cineform's NeoScene to transcode into the Cineform codec (similar to ProRes). This allows you to remove pulldown from Canon's 24p AVCHD, if you want to edit the 24p stuff natively.

The easiest way is Apple's way. All is built in and works without issues.

Apple's standard procedure is transcoding into ProRes (or AIC in FCE) and editing those files.

You could also use Cineform's NeoScene to transcode into the Cineform codec (similar to ProRes). This allows you to remove pulldown from Canon's 24p AVCHD, if you want to edit the 24p stuff natively.

The easiest way is Apple's way. All is built in and works without issues.

So it's a simple transfer process and FCP just converts it automatically?
Is there anything that you would need to change in the settings of FCP before editing?

The way it works is this. You connect your camera (or a card reader) to your Mac. You go to 'Log and Transfer' menu. It will see your camcorder (or the card) and you can choose the clips to import. Depending on the speed of your Mac, the transfer may take longer or shorter, since it is converting AVCHD into another codec (ProRes, or something else of your choice). The resulting files will be in full 1920x1080 resolution, at the same framerate as the original source (60i is the usual). You can comfortably edit the resulting files, apply effects, transitions, etc. Any normal reasonably recent Mac should handle them without major issues.

The result can then be down-sampled for DVD output to DVD Studio Pro, or exported into some other QuickTime format (MPEG-4, MPEG-2, AVCHD, whatever), in full HD, or down-sampled to 720p, or whatever.

To create Blu-ray discs, you'll need Adobe's Encore (or Roxio Toast Titanium). Both can create full Blu-ray discs (30-60GB), or encode using AVCHD and allow you to burn HD on ordinary DVD-R discs for full HD playback in a standard Blu-ray player. That way, you don't need a blu-ray burner and Blu-ray recordable discs, and can still produce Blu-ray compatible discs in HD. You can only comfortably fit about 60 minutes of 1920x1080 HD content on a standard dual-layer DVD-R, though.

Thanks for the input!