Hi,

According to the Movie Edit Pro 16 Plus manual, you should be able to edit AVCHD.  Provided your system has the requirements

Minimum requirements for HD editing:
• Intel Pentium 4 with 3 GHz or dual core with at least 1.3 GHz
• 1 GB RAM (2 GB or more recommended)
• DirectX®
9.0c compatible graphics card, min. 128 MB VRAM, and Pixelshader 2.0, ATI X300 or better, NVIDIA GeForce 6600 or better

Recommended minimum requirements for AVCHD editing
• Intel® Core™ 2 quad processor with 2.66 GHz
• 3 GB RAM
• ATI Radeon HD 3000 series or higher with 512 MB VRAM

You are likely to have to purchase and activate additional codecs and possibly need to import the file as MPEG2.  Having said all this, you are going to likely run in to serious concerns with rendering and export speeds which will be a bit of a pain.  You should just try it with a short video, if not happy download the free trial of MEP2014 and see how much faster rendering is.  I have MEP MX Premium and I see a huge difference in rendering (no longer a need to pre-render) and export is easily 5 times faster.

You need to decide what you can live with.  If you decide to upgrade (purchase MEP2014) do yourself a huge favor and buy the premium version.  You may not think you need all the extras, but I can tell you from personal experience that sooner or later you will.  I learned this the hard way.  I went with the least expensive version when I bought MX and fortunately within days I figured out my mistake, and Magix sales allowed me to return the basic version and purchase the Premium version.

George

Hi,

I would never occur to me to ask why you bought the camera before knowing if your editing software could handle it or not.  You buy the camera to get the best original images possible, and then if your editing software cannot handle it, you find one that can.  This software changes and gets better pretty much every year or two.  Image quality is the most important, so the process you used is exactly the one I would have used when buying a new camera.

Hi Gandjcarr;

Thanks for that info!  

Yes, my system is more then capable of handling the video editing... Core-i5 2500K at 4.6ghz, with 8GB DDR3-1600 Ram, and a Radeon HD6950.

I dont wanna do anything fancy, this is my first video camera so I'ma bit new to making my own videos and all I want to do is just make some short home videos of my Ferrets playing... though I figure at some point I eventually start doing other things with the camera, who knows.

As for my MEP16+HD.. if it turns out I need to upgrade it to a newer version; how would I go about that exactly.... I cant really find any info on upgrades, or upgrade costs, on the Magix website...  Logging onto my account on the Magix website and looking at my registered products, there is no option for "upgrade this product" etc.. So sorta curious as to how they would handle doing an upgrade and what the prices generally range...