Mac Forum / General / Hardware / November 2007

You certainly won't be able to do anything with them in iMovie, and I
expect Toast won't be able to use it to burn a video DVD.

Apple's AVCHD support appears to be limited to Intel Macs. It was
introduced in the latest versions of Final Cut Express and iMovie, but
only for Intel Macs. The same restriction applies to Final Cut Studio.

This means that anyone with a PowerPC Mac (G4 or G5) will not be able to
do any editing or playback of AVCHD video, nor convert it to a standard
DVD or any other video format.

The only way around this will be if a third party implements support for
AVCHD on G4/G5.

In your case, given the current apparent lack of AVCHD support, the best
you would be able to do would be to get the raw data onto your computer
and burn it to a data DVD as an AVCHD file (assuming it is small
enough), or copy it onto another storage medium such as an external hard
drive, then take that to an Intel Mac to do anything with it.