Newbie: Questions on AVCHD workflow
 

Hello everyone I just got my first AVCHD camcorder last week a Sony HDR CX550 and will be purchasing a Sony Prosumer rig sometime next year. Anyway I am using PC coming from a old Mac and Final cut pro. Avid MC5 which is ok for editing but I have photoshop and the other programs that come with it the software just dose not flow with each other like Premire suite dose. Next month I will be purchasing Adobe Premiere CS5 suit. Now the questions. With AVCHD is the importing of files straight forward? And how is the encoding or do you use another program? I will be shooting HD but I need to distribute HD Blue ray and SD DVD of the same material? Any tips you can give me would be great.

For importing the raw files, the most bulletproof procedure is to use the Sony Picture Motion Browser software that came with the camera.
You can render out your edited PPro CS5 timeline to the various delivery formats from within PPro.
Or, for Blu Ray & DVD, you can export the PPro project to Encore where you can author the disk first, and then Encore will render to the appropriate format and burn the disk.
There will be a significant learning curve for each step of the process to get from raw video to finished delivery product.
Adobe has extensive online teaching resources, video tutorials, etc. You should explore these assets in detail- it will get you up to speed much faster than trial and error

Is the workflow a little different for Premiere compare to FCP? I know you take your Sequence into compressor then after you encode it go to DVD studio.

You can go either way:
You can encode from PPro timeline with Adobe media Encoder, then take the encode to Encore, or, as I've mentioned above, you can export the PPro project directly to Encore using Dynamic Link, and encode after authoring the disk and you are ready to burn.