As most of you probably know- the new FCE4 is being touted as being able to edit AVCHD footage from the current crop of AVCHD camcorders.
On Apple's site a video shows the AVCHD footage as being "imported" prior to using in the timeline-would anyone know if this is being re-encoded? Why can't the clips be copied to a folder on the Mac's HD and then simply pointed to as the source media for editing? I'm guessing there's some sort of re-encoding being done- anyone have any info on this "import" and what's happening?

I'd like to use footage from the camcorder by simply copying to a folder and editing at a later time- which doesn't seem possible via FCE4. Is this true AVCHD support or a workaround- which isn't too bad but not true "drop and drag" as you'd expect from native editing.

Also- can I assume you can now capture and edit HDV natively without using the AIC codec?
Thanks guys.

According to page 220 of the online FCE4 manual, FCE4, just like FCP6, doesn't support native editing of AVCHD.

It looks like there's no native HDV editing either, page 237 talks about capturing HDV using the AIC, which seems to be the only way to do it.

The type of workflow you're proposing isn't currently possible with the current Final Cut programs.

Thank you Chris.
I wasn't aware an online manual was available- thanks for the effort.

Might you know what's happening during "import" of the AVCHD files- what process is going on (which re-encoding codec)?

Too bad no native HDV importing- would have been a worthy upgrade for lots of people if it could have handled HDV natively.

Thanks again.

It transcodes both AVCHD and HDV to AIC, no ProRes in FCE, unfortunately.

Glad to help!