Hi All,

I have shot a hell of a lot of footage over 4 months in the UK ans US. I intend to try the demo Pinnacle Studio Plus that came with the camera.

As this is AVCH video I would be interested in recommendations for a machine spec to do this job.

I was considering an ex corporate P4 3gig machine ($120 form the auctions).I would then put in 2gig of ram and a good video card. They come with 160gig HD and no operating system.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.

Most likely P4 will not be enough.

I have an XP box with a Pentium D (dual P4) at 3 GHz, and it's not enough to run that Pinnacle demo without compromises. I began storing my footage from my Panny SD9, because the only software that worked, albeit slowly, was the supplied HDWriter.

My solution came in the form of a new Apple computer, and it works GREAT. I bought a mac mini($500), and updated it to OS X 10.5.4. iMovie detected the Panny, thumbnailed all the clips, and imported them without a problem.

The trouble I had, was not enough hard drive space! Even so, iMovie stopped when it ran out of hd space, and identified which .mts files were not imported. The completed clips can be scrubbed through back and forth as fast as you move the mouse, and you have the Date/Time dynamically displayed in the clip's upper right hand corner. Many of the transitions are applied in realtime, and iMovie gives you complete control over RGB values, as well as a realtime histogram.

iMovie had no trouble with Panasonic's odd .mts files. When you are ready to create your media, iDVD automatically integrates iMovie projects so that you don't have to go find them.

I'm glad to have a one stop solution

Thanks for the reply. That's a solution I hadn't thought of. Can imovie save out to avch on standard dvd like the sd5 camera does?

Looking at the many choices for output, there is a selection for H.264, but the actual media creation is handled by iDVD. I don't have PS3 to test anything with high def.