Hey, everyone. I've been struggling with a lot of footage and how to import and edit it quickly. I've been using a Mac and iMovie which works pretty well, but it's a bit of a headache when you have an external drive full of archived raw AVCHD footage/file structure.
I've been using Handbrake (www.handbrake.fr) for a while to convert files from one format to another and archive DVDs to files, but just realized that Handbrake will support the .mts (.m2ts) file extensions, as well. All you need to do is open one of the .mts files as the "source" and Handbrake will convert that file to your chosen format (i.e. m4v, m4p, avi, wmv, etc...). You can even add multiple files to a queue and mass convert (although I've had some troubles w/ Handbrake crashing when there are a lot of large files).
Anyway, I'm sure a few of you already know about this, but I thought I'd pass along the tip.

-C.