I've been following the posts about XDCAM and Cineform CODECs with interest. I have gathered that AVCHD can be transcoded to XDCAM or Cineform to make editing smoother, and not sacrifice a lot of quality when the final project is rendered to it's final format. First...is that correct?

I have a consumer Sony AVCHD camera and want to create projects that will be HD in the end, probably burned to BluRay.

So, if I drag the AVCHD footage to the timeline and render it to the XDCAM format, I will end up with one continuous clip composed of all of the AVCHD clips. How can I go through this process efficiently so that I end up with all of the AVCHD "CLIPS" in XDCAM format so that the XDCAM clips can be dragged onto the timeline individually for editing? Thanks!

SVP9
64 bit Vista
Quad core
4 Gigs RAM