Canon HF20 AVCHD and iMovie on new MBP

[MacNoobz]

I purchased a Canon HF20 a few months ago and have been shooting short videos on trips, around the town, etc...

I am completely new to this, so I have a ton of footage sitting on hard drives that I don't know what to do with. The application that shipped with the camera crashes every time I try to import, so I have to manually move the AVCHD files from the camera to a hard drive.

I heard Macs were good with video so I stopped in the local Best Buy today to check out iMovie. There was some demo footage on there that I played around with for quite a while. The application seems fairly easy to navigate and I'm pretty much sold on it.

It looks like I could import my videos using 'import from archive' option (something like that anyway).

I would like to know if iMovie application would run as smooth as the demo footage in the store with the video I have archived - I plan to buy a MBP 15" 2.8GHz 4GB RAM 512MB graphics card, the video I have archived was shot in 24mbps.

After doing some searching on these forums, it looks like I can use my archived footage so that shouldn't be a problem, I just want to know if that MBP can handle it or if I should get a Mac Pro, which I really don't want to do

Any insight would be greatly appreciated

 

[MacNoobz]

extremely shameful bump

looking to make a purchase today

 

[spice weasel]

iMovie on that laptop will handle your video with no problems, other than the long time it will take to import the clips and convert them to Apple Intermediate Codec, an editable format that we are stuck with on consumer cameras until we can edit AVCHD natively.

Playing around with iMovie is addictive. Have fun!

 

[MacNoobz]

thank you for the info, i have no problem waiting for importing and/or converting.

now i just need to decide where to buy

 

[lapino]

Mind that importing into imovie will only work when you keep the original file structure. When you put all your movies in a new folder, it won't work. VoltaicHD is a good solution then.