AVCHD has been touted by Sony and Panasonic as the next step in prosumer codecs. So DV, then HDV and now, supposedly, AVCHD. Part of the initial lack of excitement was that none of the NLE's was able to support it. It was only a matter of time, that problem was to be resolved.

According to this Press release in Japanese, and then translated at Digital Camcorder News, Canopus "will be releasing a new AVCHD converter product that will convert your footage into an editable format. However, because of the fact that it converts it into the 'Canopus HQ Codec,' it is unlikely that the files will be usable outside of Canopus' Edius NLE systems." Sadly, I am not aware of any Mac Canopus products and I am guessing that is not going to change but this is the first step of many that will bring AVCHD to the fold.

The most exciting thing about AVCHD is that it fixes my biggest complaint with HDV, the mpeg-2 sound compression. So here is hoping this starts a trend by NLE's to support AVCHD.