Re: Best software to view/offload SDHC cards?

Transfer of clips, renaming, archiving, and other basic media management functions seems to be a major PITA with AVCHD footage. My experience with Panasonic's AVCCAM utility is that it doesn't preserve timecode, nor allow selection of individual clips, and has a hopelessly clunky interface. Compare this with Sony's HDCAM EX ClipBrowser 2.6 which allows all of the above and is fairly easy to use.

Shotput Pro is a nice start, but not if you are editing in a Windows environment. I'm really surprised that no third party or, god forbid, Panasonic themselves, have not addressed these basic professional issues with media management. And of course that's only for routine file transfer and logging. As far as I know there are no programs that allow for sophisticated storage and data based archiving of media in this area.

For PC users the only solution that seems to be functional at this point is to transcode them using Cineform which essentially triples the storage requirements of the media. Since my editing software easily handles the footage in it's native format this seems to be an rather clumsy and costly workaround that could be resolved with a better application.