Just when you thought you were out of luck trying to edit tapeless camcorder video on the Mac, Apple has just announced the availability of Final Cut Studio 2. The new update to Final Cut Pro 6.01 includes AVCHD editing support, a feature long needed on the Mac OS. Obviously, this still puts AVCHD editing on the Mac out of the realm of regular consumers who don’t want to throw down over a grand for the application. Read on for some things you should know about editing AVCHD in FCP.
First off, Apple warns that AVCHD files are transcoded to either the ProRes 422 or Apple Intermediate Codec when captured. This means that AVCHD video will actually take up about ten times more space than it normally would on your camcorder. A 2-minute, 200MB AVCHD file can take up as much as 2GB when transcoded to ProRes 422.
Also, In and Out points in the Log and Transfer window cannot be set, so you must transfer the entire clip when capturing AVCHD footage.
