[milkmanchris]

I have been reading and playing abuot with Final Cut Express and AVCHD files from my SD5.

If I use the top 'quality' setting of 1920 x 1080, anything captured has to be rendered, adding more to the production time (how professional does that sound), however if I drop the camera settings to 1440 x 1080 it fits in nicely and no rendering.

I can see no difference between the 2 settings (personally), can anyone else?

I have read that the data rate for both formats is the same, that just confused me even more.

Any input gladly appreciated people

[redsox_mark]

In theory 1920 should be better; in practice it is very hard to tell any difference between 1920 and 1440. And if it uses the same bitrate then it is actually less compressed, so you may get less compression artifacts.