I was thinking I could provide customers with a high def version on an SD card in the format of AVCHD but I can't find any software that will transcode/export an edited video to AVCHD.The new blu-ray players have a usb/sd slot and play AVCHD.

Don't know if this will work for what you are trying but MultiAVCHD might do it and it is free. Just google it.

Vegas will export as will Edius. Not on my editor at the moment but I am sure CS5.5 will as well.

Ron Evans

As will FCP7 -- in fact I don't know software that doesn't export to avchd -- though it will typically be described as h.264

Cheers,
GB

Saw this the other day - looked interesting.

Adapter - Free Image and Video Converter for Mac and PC (http://www.macroplant.com/adapter/)

Adapter will not work with camera files (M2TS or MTS), otherwise it looks like it might be a nice converter for other file types.

The current version 10 of PowerDirector does a very good job of editing and exporting to various AVCHD (h264) formats. And it does it very quickly on a multi-core+GPU PC.

I have FCP 6 and it doesn't export to AVCHD neither does compressor. They both have a H.264 option but they are wrapped in QT or some other container. I'm pretty sure it would have to be exported back to an sd card in the same format a camera would record as. I'm left with the impression blu-ray players have gone out of their way to prevent any illegitimate viewing of copied movies and in doing so have made it difficult for consumers to use it to view legit non-commercial movies. I even tried exporting a movie as DIVX which my player said it supported but no matter what I did I couldn't get it to recognize the movie. I was looking for an easy way to give clients a hd movie without having to buy a blu-ray burner and media and software to author a blu-ray disc but I'm starting to come to the conclusion that's what I need to do. What a headache!

My apologies, I misunderstood. I thought you wanted to encode to a file that would play on a system that understood AVCHD -- I see that what you want is a method to author AVCHD -- much the way a DVD is MPEG2, but that MPEG2 file must be organized very specifically for playback on a set-top DVD player.

Note that the file created by FCP -- even though wrapped as an mp4 or mov -- is entirely suitable for AVCHD playback, assuming you have made mp4 choices that are 'legal' as concerns frame size, data rate, audio, et cetera.

There are tutorials out there that will show you exactly how the files must be structured, and what the file naming convention must be -- here is a link I found in a few seconds using Google. I didn't try this method, I didn't scrutinize the tutorial ... I link it as an example of what you are looking for:
AVCHD Disc (How to create) - Windows 7 Forums (http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/107100-avchd-disc-how-create.html)

Maybe even easier would be to purchase software like this, which I have used:
AVCHD Camera Archives, AVCHD TV Playback, 3D Editor | ShedWorx (http://www.shedworx.com/revolverhdmac)
I've used it to create DVDs that have HD files on them that a BluRay player will read, to create thumbdrives that can be read by a PS3 player, et cetera.

Cheers,
GB

You could also try Adobe Elements Adobe Premiere Elements 10 | Features (http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere-elements/features.html). To encode from your FCP output to AVCHD files or Bluray disc.

Ron Evans