HD editing software - AVCHD

So my dad has a Panasonic AVCHD camera and the files it creates are huge and i have had difficulty playing them back let alone editing them.

Adobe and Pinnacle have editing suites for them - any suggestions or other ones to look at? The files are .mts, i can re-encode them to something smaller then edit them but that kinda defeats the purpose of HD.

Obviously full video editing suites arent required.

I only keep a partial eye on this sort of thing, but from what I do know, you might as well stick with those two vendors. Better hardware, and playing around with different AVC decoders (if there are any) is about all you can do. Assuming it's 1080*? Could see if the camera has a 720p mode, although few do.

Could also ask nem, I think he has such a toy, he may have other suggestions.

oh duh......because it's h264, does your video card support hardware h264 stuff? that will help too.

Cheers

My main comp seems to have h264, my dads doesnt

Even the newest vlcplayer seems to have some difficulty with the files. Might need to play around a bit with different recording modes.

Theres a trial for the adobe program but i think its limited somehow. Will see how it goes.

Any way of hosting a reasonable sized sample? We have Avid Liquid here, I could give it a spin on that.

AVID is the best PC based editing program.

I'd also suggest you see if you can do a bulk convert after you download the file without losing quality. It might not be the amount of data slowing you down but the uncompression of the format.