Go to the point where they start to overlap. Match frame each clip back to the bin (make sure the clips are in the same bin). Then selecting both clips choose group clips from the clip menu. Choose group by inpoints. That makes a new clip. Edit that into the timeline and then from the special menu choose multicam. Thats basically it but you are best

Sure using multi cam mode and grouping your two shots. Or you can load one in the timeline and the other in the source monitor and gang them so they move together.

Yes if you are marking in and outs from the source monitor that can be a problem but if you follow the method I posted using the trim to tail command the extra frame is not a problem.

Type +10:00 in the composer monitor and hit enter to advance 10 seconds. Then use trim to tail to cut the rest of the clip off. The great thing is the Avid remembers the +10 and all you have to do to repeat the jump forward is to hit enter again. If all your clips are next to each other you then just have to hit enter followed by the trim to tail button

All excellent suggestions. At the risk of being patronising a thought on the camera. To get a narrow depth of field effect you need plenty of distance between the background, subject and camera. With the camera well back and zoomed in you should be able to get a defocused background with most cameras in my experience. But of course I don't know

The best workaround I have at the moment is expanding on Andrews excellent suggestion of having multiple timeline views and mapping the display waveform command to a button for quick toggling. What I would love is a way to map timeline views to a button as well. Any ideas on how to do that?

Best explained here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_rate

No? It seems that AVCHD is a 'read only' format and only cameras can write to that codec. True?

Well you can of course use Avid to open it but that aside you can export from Avid an ALE which will give you a text file of the contents of your bin. Or you could print the bin.

Been searching all over the net for a while now and thought I'd try the experts here. Does anybody know if it is possible to encode a quicktime to AVCHD format and 'write' that back to the camera? So that the camera becomes a HD deck for viewing edited AVCHD clips on a television.