I don't think there's any way around the skipping frames.  I have a 3.0g Quad Core, 3.5gigs RAM and a killer video card, and still have the skipping when previewing AVCHD or MTS files.  Sometimes it helps to pause the video and wait for it to pre-load more of the section you're working on.  ANd other times, you might try right-clicking on the video track and selecting "Creat Frame Table".  Many times, it's just a matter of Movie Edit Pro keeping time by using a frame table file, which can sometimes get mixed up.  Hope this helps.

i think they should come up with a patch for background rendering, i am new using movie editor, but i know these other apps with this feature do not have that problem. they do rendering while you perform your edits. this could help a little to solve the problem of sttutering playback , and not only sttutering but, out  of synch audio. it gets scary, i tried to render a 2 hr piece into an avi and it showed me it was going to take like 10 hrs to do it, man that's scary, i just needed a new app to be able to handle these new MTS files and i knew a consumer app could do that. i like movie editor because of all the features, specially the audio capabilities, which is great for less than a $100.00, but !!!

It's mov files from a Kodak Zi8 camera. Nothing fancy or that big / difficult to render.

Mov files like avi a wrapper formats and can contain almost anything within...

Your camera captures in multiple formats using the H.264 codec presented with the .mov extension....

File formats   video: H.264 (MOV), AAC LC still: JPEG   Capture mode  
1080p (1920 × 1080, 30 fps)
720p/60 fps (1280 × 720, 60 fps)
720p (1280 × 720, 30 fps)
WVGA (848 × 480, 30 fps)
Still (5.3 MP, 16:9 widescreen, interpolated)

The H.264 codec is proving complicated and resource intensive to edit with on consumer level PC...even if you are running Adobe Premier pro.

The ability to handle HD H.264 smoothly is going to come down to your processing power. I have problems processing HD H.264 on my Quad core PC with lots of processes turned off in the background  (e.g. Internet, anti virus etc etc).

H.264 is proving to be a pain for a lot of users. I don't know if there is a fix per se

I hear you but in that case playing the mov file from Windows Media Player for instance should result in same poor performance, which is not true. My machine playbacks even 1080p on YouTube with no issue but when it comes to Magix it seems that more than enough CPU cycles are needed. It's sad because i had to upgrade to 15 thinking that will solve the issue since it's the latest version, tailored to HD video editing.

I hope there is a fix per se or else all these FlipHD and Kodaks are useless

I hear you too... the simple fact is a video player and a video editor is a different beast and handle HD video in different ways.

I perosnally use Corel video Studio x2 and I have the same problem with the H.264 codec as do many Pro-sumer video editors have. They are an intensely compressed video to load up on an editor.

HDV runs smoothly and is a different kind of High Definition video...but it lost the war with blue-ray.

An i5 or i7 CPU ight do the trick but as you say... it should work smoothly with a majority of PC systems, but it doesn't. There seems to be no applicable standards between the manufacturers (Sony, JVC etc) for AVCHD and some of them are coming up with varients in bit rates which compliactes things even more.

You are not alone...I can assure you of that. What I do when I work with AVCHD is use a program like SUPER (free) to convert it to a standard definition DV-AVI or DVD Mpeg2 if I'm going to make DVD's for the family & friends...a majority of whome...haven't upgraded to HD yet.