I have started using a Data Video DN-60 which produces a AVCHD files. How will this format .M2T work on an HDV time line with Premiere Pro CS3?

Are you asking this because you are running on a Windows system and Windows says that the file type is AVCHD? Windows is lying to you. "M2T" is HDV. It is not AVCHD. The file extension for AVCHD is "mts" not M2T. AFAIK, the DN60 cannot record AVCHD at all, let alone record it from an HDV cam. As for whether CS3 will ingest M2T files, my recollection is that the manual (and the help files and even the "file type" listing in the import box) say that m2t is a supported format in CS3.

Jay you are correct. Windows tells me that the .m2t is AVCHD. Good to know the DN-60 only records HDV. which seems to work fine in an HDV timeline with CS3. Thanks for the truth.

If you footage realy was AVCHD you would not be able to import that into CS3. It is not supported.

I'm considering purchasing a AVCHD Camera. Will the DN-60 HDV M2T files work on an AVCHD time line?

If you are now using PPro CS5 or 5.5, there should be do problem.

Different story if you are still using CS3, as you stated in a previous post. There is no such thing as an AVCHD timeline in CS3 because AVCHD was not a supported format. To use AVCHD with CS3, you will need to get something like Cineform's NeoScene ($99 in USD) to ingest/convert the AVCHD files into a format that CS3 can edit.

But, if you now have CS5 or 5.5, and have hardware Mercury Playback enabled --- which requires a CUDA-capable nVidia based graphics display card in your system --- you should have no problem.

Maybe you are concerned because you have heard or read: (a) the AVCHD format uses a lot more compression than HDV and (b) the formats have differing pixel shapes with AVCHD using square pixels for its 1920 x 1080 format while HDV uses rectangular pixels for its 1140 x 1080 format. This actually is not a problem with C5 and 5.5. While these differences mean that the computer has to do more work to match the formats for editing and playback, the process is transparent to the CS5 user.

I often do this kind of mix and match. I have combined up to 4 HDV cams with 3 AVCHD cams on a single multi-cam AVCHD timeline. To be more precise, since I use a three screen set-up with monitoring via a Matrox MXO2 Mini, I use the CS5.5/Matrox 1920 x 1080 AVCHD sequence preset. However, I did use CS5's native AVCHD preset for a while in the summer of 2010 when Matrox did not yet have the CS5 drivers for the "Mini,"

The only limitation that I ran into was that the system really started to bog down with editing AVCHD multi-cam segments that were 20 minutes or longer. (All that computational work eventually starts to tax the responsiveness of the computer). The workarounds were simple: convert to use Cineform intermediates or edit the project in short segments or both.