New iMacs and H.264 import

Question

Hello!
I am going to buy a new camera with Flash memory and h.264. I was told that it is a pain to import large h.264 movies from such device. It seems obvoius that Apple was not able to propose something with old hardware like Radeon 2600, but now it seems to be possible with Radeon 4800.
Are there any information about improvements with h.264 encoding/decoding with new iMacs?
Regards,
Kirill Boyko

Answer 1

Hello Tom!
Thank you for answer!
I am a newbie so correct me if I'm wrong.
When you say "gets converted" .. "during capture" you mean FCE Capture process. This process is managed using Capture window in FCE and was designed specially for tape camcorders. According to FCE manual Capture process does transcode your video.
Editing HDV Using the Apple Intermediate Codec
Your HDV video is transcoded by the Apple Intermediate Codec during capture. The
Apple Intermediate Codec is a high-quality video codec optimized for playback
performance and quality. Although the data rate of the Apple Intermediate Codec is
three to four times higher than the data rate of the native MPEG-2 HDV, the
processing requirements to play back your video are less. Unlike native MPEG-2 HDV,
the Apple Intermediate Codec does not use temporal compression, so every frame
can be decoded and displayed immediately, without first decoding other frames.
For new camcorders which instead use file based media the Capture process is managed by Log and Transfer window. Which is slightly different in workflow and capabilities but logically the same - it transcodes H.264 video into AIC format.
I suppose that Apple historically split these two processes which are same by nature.
What I am interested in is this phrase in manual:
AVCHD footage is not captured natively but is transcoded to Apple Intermediate Codec.
By this Apple mean that HDV is captured "natively" what I think means "easer". SO I suppose it uses some hardware acceleration during transcoding from MPEG-2 to AIC which results in much better time and less CPU usage.
SO, my question is:
Wether it will be possible to use similar HW acceleration proposed by new RADEON/GEFORCE to transcode h.264 faster, or x19 times faster as stated in ATI  feature list?
Regards,
Kirill