The new Panasonic camera that records high def to SD memory card, the HDC-SD1, is now out in Japan.

I use Vegas and David Newman (CineForm) is testing the waters re an editing solution for this new format.

For HDV, I see that a dual core Pentium D (820 or 840) processor is recommended.

But I don't know what the difference between one of these Pentium D processors and, say, the Core 2 Duo E6300 processor, is.

Is the Core 2 duo faster than the Pentium D and is the 6300 good enough for HDV and, potentially, for AVCHD when an editing solution becomes available?

I guess this is speculation with regard to AVCHD, but I may be doing some HDV editing as well.

Thanks :)

Whatever the processor is, I think you might need 2GB of RAM or more to edit native AVCHD. For proxies, 512 MB should be good enough.

Is the Core 2 duo faster than the Pentium D and is the 6300 good enough for HDV and, potentially, for AVCHD when an editing solution becomes available?
Yes, the C2D is much faster than the Pentium D. An E6300 is roughly equivalent to an overclocked AMD X2 4600+. If you overclock it (very easily done on air with the stock heatsink), you can surpass the fastest AMD X2 extreme processor. It plays back AVCHD without problems. Editing should be ok but it is hard to tell because there aren't any viable editing software for AVCHD yet.

Thank you, gentlemen!

I'm definitely going to have 2 gigs of RAM but I'm thinking of going with the cheapest Core 2 Dual processor because the others get pretty pricey.

Thanks again for the help.