Hello.  I am on an 8 core Mac Pro (about 4 years old).  I have an ATI Radeon 1900 graphics card and 16 gigs of RAM.  My software is on the main hard drive and all of my projects & source footage are on a second internal drive.  I am linking 2 different media formats using AMA.

One is AVCHD footage from a Panasonic AF100 and the other is MXF files from a Cannon XF300.

Should I transcode either of these formats and if so, to what codec?

My second question is, are there any harware upgrades I could/should do? (Graphics card, external raid...)