So what am I missing
 

So what am I missing (AVC in Windows)

Manipulating 5DII AVC files has been one of the easiest task. And it has been working fine on my old Core Duo Laptop(2GB Ram), and of course Quad Core, i.e., viewing, loading, and manipulating.

First the output quality of 5DII is so good that I have hardly had any reason for color correction/grading (may be my perception needs to change).

Second CoreAVC is such an fantastic and fast codec, that it loads up in all video editors pretty fast. Especially in VirtualDub where I can easily determine Trim frames.

The only issue (kind of) I had, was with audio. "sowt" format used for audio seems to be problem. But I need to demux the audio anyway to clean it up (5DII inbuilt recording is not there for me).

So here are my steps,

1. Demux the audio to WAV file.
2. Clean up audio (normalize, compress, equalize, and remove those nasty pops & clicks)
3. Load the video and audio in AviSynth (for NTSC DVD),

v = DirectShowSource("c:\MVI_0101.MOV", fps=30).Lanczos4Resize(720,480)
a = WavSource("c:\MVI_0101c.WAV").SSRC(48000)
return AudioDub(v,a).ConvertToFPS(30000,1001)

4. Encode with any encoder for super quality DVD. All you get is perfectly sync NTSC DVD.

Same steps can be followed to create BluRay or other HD quality formats, just change size 1920,1080.
And to get perfectly sync'ed 24p change to ConvertToFPS(24000,1001)

You can always add Color correction, transitions, effects, and extras as you want.

Or if you do need to use it in other editors, you can save the output to intermediate codec AVI.

Software required,

AviSynth (sourceforge.net)
CoreAVC (coreavc.com)
K-Lite Codec Pack (free-codecs.net)
VirtualDub (virtualdub.org)

Forget all that and just get the Neo Scene which does it in one step, and it is only $129.

Looks good!

What encoder are you using to convert the avisynth output to DVD/BluRay?

Edit: Its ConvertFPS not ConvertToFPS.

Don't remember it exactly, but I used ffmpeg with libx264 and libfaac codecs for Blu-Ray output. Though x264 and other codecs are also options.