Hi All,

Looking to purchase the SONY SR12 AVCHD camera and just coming to terms with the fact that this purchase is just the tip of the financial iceberg !

Looks like a new high spec PC/Laptop is required.

My day to day work laptop isn't dual core, so looking to use this to simply download onto a external HDD drive when on a trip and to purchase powerful PC to edit AVCHD using probably Pinnacle Ulitmate v12 software (any other recommendations - I'm not Stephen Speillberg) when back at home after a trip.

Can anyone recommend any specific make/models of PC that are known to be capable of handling Pinnacle, AVCHD files??

Thanks Jon

PC recommendations are pretty much going to be difficult with the availability of various brands and DIY sets. I suggest you check the software's system requirements and if you want to future proof a bit, get their recommended system criteria and not the minimum.

I have a 3.2ghz QUAD core running here and it will not play the clips very good once on the timeline.
It's best to convert them to a intermediate codec and then they will fly and you could even edit it with what you have there if it's a old 2.8 or 3 Gig HT CPU

For example, this is what I do.
I use a small free Canopus software converter and once the AVCHD file is on the computer here I just double click it and it fires up the converter and converts it to an 1440/1080 intermediate avi codec which then is really easy to edit with. There is no quality loss between the two.

A 10 second clip takes about 15 seconds to convert but the converter is not maxing out the CPU when it's doing it so they could tweek it to run faster. The CPU is only at 34% while converting so a less powerful CPU will convert it just as fast I suppose.