I have not seen this mentioned yet, so figured I would. I am in the beginning stages of testing and working with AVCHD footage from my Ax2000. I just shot 90 minutes of footage and wanted to test the download speed from the card directly to my mac pro. I am not going into FCP with this test, just onto my hard drive so I can backup my footage and clear the card. I am using patriot class 10 cards. When using the supplied sony usb cable and transferring directly from the camera I was getting approx 7 mb/s transfer rate. When using my multi card reader I was getting a much faster 20 mb/s transfer speed.

I noticed basically the same thing when transferring from the cam as opposed to a card reader for the USB adapter that my pro duo stick came with (which made no sense to me considering its a USB transfer). The rates were faster with the reader and adapter...