I sure don't know a lot about AVCHD edit/burning, but from the feedback i'm seeing on various sites... most are saying that AVCHD quality does not match that of normal HDV. The ulead people are saying that AVCHD burning is extremely limited, and the pinnacle people are saying that the quality is just plain poor in comparison.

My guess is that it's still considered a very new format and has yet to have all the bugs removed , and optimum compression rates figured... which of course time will solve. But until such time as the general reports come back purely positive, I won't be flowing towards that end of the spectrum.

Nice find. I had forgotten about these add-ons, I think this model version will connect with the PSP3 as well as a media burner, but I don't have one yet to test it. And I believe your are correct about burning readable DVDs for BR players, but without a real test, it still PR noise.

The problem with AVCHD is fast motion with big colorspace changes, and this is more a DSP issue of "time" to encode in the camera. More powerful DSP camera ics in the near future will produce AVCHD to be near flawless in encoding. A lot of retail electronic engineers see AVCHD as a wireless HD media format for home based media centers.

There are some pretty good quality samples of the CX7 video and stills http://www.hdr-cx7.blogspot.com/here[/link]. The quality looks pretty darned good to me. I know that the footage would be hard for users of Ulead and Pinnacle software to deal with, but for me it should be pretty easy. I'll just use Gearshift. My computer is a little underpowered and I'm already using proxies anyway.

I have no doubts of the output of the cam itself... It's more than likely right up there with in terms of PQ as the rest of the Sony cams. And MAYBE going DIRECT from camera to disk is so bad either (I don't know)... but it's offloading AVCHD to computer and trying to edit that the complications begin.

There are now a few NLE's out there that can do AVCHD edit... but none can yet do it smoothly without issue, flexibility, and/or ease.

I'm all for cutting edge stuff, but it has to be reliable and it has to work. AVCHD may one day be the way to go, but it certainly is not there yet.

Laurence,
This is how I've been making avchd disks, maybe this will help, they play in all the avchd certified players I've tried them on so far (ps3 included).
Download & install Nero7 Ultra Edition Enhanced. Install the latest updates.
Use Nero Vision 4 and at the top Create DVD, Editable DVD, AVCHD Disk.
Goto Options and assign temp directory to large ntfs partition and other directory settings.
Under Video options setup the avchd encoding parameters. I manually setup to encode avchd 1440x1080 UFF @14000kbs (custom settings).
Drag & drop your hdv.m2t files into the editor.
You can figure out the rest. Dolby 5.1 works well.
I've been converting my hdv.m2t files @25mbs to avchd@14000kbs or 12mbs (1280x720 etc@8mbs).
Burn a avchd disk, then create the BDMV disk as folders on your harddisk.
The avchd videos are put into a container with a m2ts extension, you will find them under the STREAMS folder you can play these in the supplied Nero Showtime player. The PS3 plays these dvd's without a hitch.

Also for $24.00us dollars nero has a hd-dvd plugin.
If you export to mp4 you need to save the project, close nero vision4 and restart.reload the project for the mp4 settings to work correctly. If you change the parameters & export directly the settings don't seem to be applied, at least this is what's happening on my system.

The AVCHD disks I've been making using this software the videos look very good. I've been using single pass, 2 pass is giving me a problem, not sure why.

The nero's user interface is somewhat awkward to use. But the conversions do work, the avchd disk will playback in the PS3, Sony Blu-Ray Players & Pioneer Blu-Ray players that are avchd certified.
Creating a avchd disk produces a file in the h264 codec somewhat different then using the export & creating a mp4(h264) video. The mp4 video doesn't have as good motion as the avchd disk. The mp4 video uses aac audio 2/0 or 5.1. The avchd disks can use lpcm/dolby2/0-.5.1 audio.

I'm very satisfied with my avchd disks encoded at 14000kbs, the 12000kbs also are good.
You can also manually burn the avchd disk from the BDMV folders using Nero UDF 2.6 physical partition (manually selected). Can read these on a Vista machine, not xp. Can also use udf 2.5 which the ps3 stills plays.
You can always use the the NeroVision4 software to also re-import the videos back onto the harddisk from the avchd disks.

Whether your creating a avchd disk or a Blu-Ray disk the finals videos are put into m2ts file containers that reside under the STREAMS folder. The directory structure is similar to a true Blu-Ray disk with the top level directory being BDMV.

The m2ts containers when creating a avchd disk with have the h264 and audio codecs.
The m2ts containers when creating a BD disk with usually have the hd-mpeg2 video and audio codecs.

This is how it's done, menu's, chapters & all.
My avchd disks look great.

HD-DVD is also nice, possibly a tad better since you can use the true hd-mpeg2 files. I just decided not to go the route of hd-dvd right now.

Even converting my hd-mpeg2 to avc Standard defintion at 2mbs puts alot of video onto one dvd and looks pretty damn good for 2000kbs. I've been making my standard defintion using 720x576@29.97fps UFF. Gave the pal framesize a try because of the higher resolution compared to 720x480ntsc. They work and play on the ntsc players so have stayed with the process. Converting the hd-mpeg2 to standard def h264 avchd disk is fast using single pass.

Yes, it is great to use AVCHD-DVDs (so, a bluray structure with AVCHD and 5.1 surround, burned on DVD-R). At the moment, we have only Nero 7.9x that can do so - with limited quality, since the material is encoded again. Better solutions will come...

"There are now a few NLE's out there that can do AVCHD edit... but none can yet do it smoothly without issue, flexibility, and/or ease."
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I wouldn't be so sure of that. Vegas seems to handle AVCHD pretty well aside from stuttering on the timeline... but then again both m2t and Cineform stutter on my timeline too since my P4 is really kind of trailing edge at this point. I think that if I just generate proxies for the AVCHD clips with Gearshift (like I already have to do anyway) and just edit the proxies like usual, that aside from maybe a little more render time, I'll hardly even notice the difference.

Maybe the next version of DVD Architect will do this AVCHD on DVD+-R format and make Bluray converts of us all. There are beta testers among us who already know I'm sure. Maybe one of them will let it slip ;-)

It looks like Pinnacle Studio 11 has a new update that lets it write Bluray AVCHD onto a standard DVD+-R as well. You can see some info http://www.pinnaclesys.com/PublicSite/us/Products/Consumer+Products/Home+Video/Studio+Family/Studio+Plus+11+Support/Download+Area/Drivers+-+Updates?mode=documentshere[/link].Yeah, it looks like Bluray on DVD+-R is now allowed! Thank God for competition and the format war! With AVCHD compression, there should be a lot more than 40 minutes playback on a dual layer disc. I wonder if it can do menus?

Look in both directions when you cross the road