First off I am not a professional I edit as a hobby only. But I have been lucky, my first editing system was Liquid 6 then Avid Liquid 7. After that I when to FCP but, it was a G5 system and to edit HD I would have purchase another MAC which was out of the question. I build my own PC and took advantage of the Media Composer upgrade it was a no brainer saving over fifteen hundred dollars. I also got a great deal on Adobe Premier CS5 because I had Photoshop and that’s where I am at now. I video, and edit, events so I quest I could call myself an event video photographer. I have done some Weddings with a friend who does it part time. Anyway my camcorder is a Sony 550 AVCHD my question is any of you Avid editors edit AVCHD and if so what are your settings to transcode it? DNxHD 145, 1:1MXF or something else? I have completed projects on Premier but just edit on MC but for some reason I am not sure if it is me it seems I edit faster on it. Any opinions? Any advantages over one, or the other?

I transcode it to DNxHD 145. I can get usable performance with it native if I play it on the timeline but if you do anything with it our have streams on multiple tracks the performance suffers greatly.

AMA is great to use as a preview and logging tool then transcode anything you know you are going to use in the project.

I'm using MC5 on a PC with Win7 64 bit. i7 processor @ 3.5ghz and 12gig ram.

Chris: do you see any difference in transcoding to Dnx145, or something like the EX35mbs codec?

I tried almost every option, and just didn't see much of a change, other than some giant leaps in the size of the file.

The 35mb EX codec is very good. I would have no problem using it.