It looks promising. So far I have been able to import short clips into iMovie, straight from my Panasonic HDC-SD9. iMovie detected the Panny, opened a 'thumbnail' window, and I clicked the IMPORT button. Once the clip is imported, you can 'scrub' through the clips (with sound).

I must qualify my enthusiasm here. I come from old obsolete Macs, but just bought a Mac Mini and updated it with X 10.5.4. I was completely shocked by the new look, and when iMovie detected my Panny, thumb-nailed the clips without freezing, then dropped my clip (realtime) onto a rotating video screen, all I could think is YES!

Currently I am importing about 1 hour of video, so I'll report back when iMovie puts them on the timeline for me.

Good to hear. So X 10.5.4 was a good update for avchd. Was that a raw avchd 'scrub' through you were talking about?

I'd like to give a quick answer, but as I am still learning this alien version of iMovie, I'm stuck in 'stupid' mode.

Here's what iMovie has to say about importing preferences:

There is a choice to either import 1080i as "Full 1920 x 1080" or "Large - 960x540"
"Selecting Large significantly reduces file size with little image quality loss."

There's a another proviso, since I have a mac mini.
"Selecting Full on this computer may result in degraded video playback"

Of course, I selected to import at Full, but now that everything is on the timeline, the mini has no problem scrubbing in both directions when my mouse cursor passes over a clip.

I did an info on the .mts clips on the Panny. It identifies .mts as a Unix executable file

What is wild, is that I only imported an hour's worth of HD from an 8 GB card, but importing it to Full 1920 x 1080 has filled up my 60 GB of free space that I had left. I'm out of room on my new mac mini!!

I'm completely blown away by this, now I'm out to buy an external drive.

8GB to 60GB! Uncompress explosion! Good thing terabyte harddrives are going way down in price.