Editing footage/Importing Footage

Hi everyone,
Hope you are all getting on well with snow leopard as I.
I am looking for a good way to store and edit footage on my MacBook Pro (specs are below).
What I have available -
- Sony AVCHD XR-520VE (MPEG-2 Recording - 16Mbit/Sec)
- iMovie '09
- iLife '09
- Snow Leopard
- 2.53Ghz, 4GB, 500GB
What I am capable of doing at the moment -
- Importing and utilising iMovie '09 with the camcorder with no problems.
What is my problem -
- 42GB AVCHD turned into 300GB uncompressed .mov (MPEG-2) upon import into iMovie
- I don't know how to import into iMovie using H.264 rather than just a .mov container.
I would therefore appreciate it if you could tell me how to do one of the following (I have no money available to solve this - an elgato h.264 turbo would go well with my diversity but I can't afford that)
- To batch convert in quicktime retaining the quality that I see in iMovie (QTamateur produced horrible video quality)
- Convert my RAW AVCHD footage straight to h.264 (again batch)
Thanks,
Fred

You need to convert it. You should be able to do it on a PC or you can use Flip4Mac to make it into QuickTime.

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Message was edited by: David Harbsmeier

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Editing footage/Importing Footage

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