[Kevin Sexton]

Hi Jen,
I found your post when looking for the answer myself. You’ve probably already figured out, so I’m really just responding for the benefit of other people who might be having the problem.

I use XDCam for pro work, but I picked up an AVCHD camera just after christmas for personal stuff: Being an editor, I use FCP for editing family stuff as well as pro work, and this is where I’m having a problem.

I tried all the same things as you, dragging and dropping, add folders. The major difference is that it seemed to be fine for the first month or two that I had the camera, but then it started getting dodgy.
Sometimes FCP recognizes the avchd, and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes I restart FCP and it’s all good, and sometimes I have to disconnect and reconnect the camera. In a few cases, I’ve plugged in the camera and let it think about it for ten minutes, and then suddenly it loads up the clips in the Log and Transfer window.

On a few occasions, I’ve fired up iMovie just to see what happens, and it does the exact same thing. Not only does it do the same thing, but it does it at the same time; if FCP is ignoring AVCHD, so is iMovie. If FCP can see the AVCHD, iMovie does too.

I’ve encountered this on two separate systems, a Mac Pro and a Macbook Pro.
So with iMovie and the two different systems, it made me think that the issue is in a shared resource, not the editor or the system itself.

A few minutes ago, I found this: https://support.apple.com/kb/TS2134
The article refers to FC Express, but suggests the problem is with a Quicktime update. Basically it suggests selecting Apple Intermediate Codec instead of ProRes to get around whatever the QT problem is.

So far so good; it recognizes the AVCHD this time, but I won’t know for sure until I’ve done it a few times.