I may be wrong here, but with my limited FCP experience, my xdcam-hd files had to be rendered into my fcp project as well, apple just didn’t use the sony transfer utility. As far as length of imports go, I imported 32min 1080 / 23.98 footage in about 10 minutes. The speed may be affected by your cpu, I’m not sure about that. I’m on a 8 core 3.2ghz mac pro.
GM