What is the best application for backing up my HD movies?

I have a Sony HDR-CX105 which outputs in Full HD (AVCHD Format) and all I want to do is import it into my iMac (Core 2 Duo 2.4ghz) and output say an H.264 MP4 so I can distribute the file to friends.
If I try to use iMovie (08) it says it willl take about a week to encode a half hour movie!
I'm sure others have gone through this chain of thought so I was hoping somone may be able to help me...  PLEASE!
I have been considering;
     Roxio Toast at £85
     Roxio Popcorn at £35
     iMove '11 at £10
but none offer a trial to establish if it will actually work.
Please offer constructive comments if you have any, I'm in a mine field right now.
Many thanks for your time,
Wesley.

My answer does not have the black Apple logo but the hardearned black belt of (bad) experience.
There is one problem with TimeMachine. It can get corrupted out of the blue with no warning and it will not want to restore correctly (as an added "bonus" you get to find this out the "hard" way, when you need it most). Plus it takes ages for the data to be copied back, sometimes days. Haven't tried my 600gb backup on Mavericks but Mountain Lion had this knack of breaking Timemachine after a couple of months.
To back up my entire server is use SuperDuper. It mirrors the drive to an external one (usb for example) The cool thing is you can use that usb drive and start the OS X from it (by holding Alt when you hear the boot chime).
This way you have a working copy of your entire machine. You can even go to another mac and boot it from there. I literally ran the OS X Server in my company from a usb drive on an old MacBook Pro until i got around to fix the problems with the actual server machine.
This has saved me twice already as the Hitachi drives Apple uses, tend to die like clockwork after 4000-5000 hours of use with no warning.
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
PS. As a sidenote... SSDs are more reliable than a normal HDD (not to mention faster) I can't stress this enough, my Server is on two SSDs now. I can't tell you how stress free the setup is, it doesn't feel like a computer but more like a router, it just works... forever. After two years with SSDs my server has had two days of downtime and their health is at 97%, they will literally last 100 years with normal use. I'd go so far as to recommend you buy an SSD and move your old HDD to an external enclosure and use that as a usb backup. (for SSDs i use Plextor / Lite-On M3s (older) or the M6s (newer))

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