How to edit Panasonic HDC TM-700/HS700 1080/60p & 50p AVCHD MTS videos on Linux&MacOS

Along with Panasonic HDC-TM700, there is another model Panasonic HDC-HS700, which also includes advanced 3MOS System and Leica Dicomar Lens. The major difference between HS700 and TM700 is that HS700 has much larger space for storing videos and pictures with 240-GB HDD and SD Card Slot. It is easy to shoot 1920 x 1080i High Definition video in HE mode or 1920 x 1080p full High Definition video in 1080/50p mode.

The 1080/50p mode for Europe and 1080/60p for US produce higher quality video comparing to other consumer camcorders with similar pricing range, but the saved 1080/50p and 1080/60 MTS is not AVCHD standard compliant. Avid Media Composer does not work with the Panasonic HS700 video footage very well.

Panasonic offers its own software HDWriter for Windows only. What a shame!!!!
How can I edit 1080/50p and 1080/60p MTS videos videos in Mac OS X or Linux?

Mac OS
Freeware Handbrake supports 1080p50 and 1080p60 videos, so just convert them to the format supported by iMovie.

Linux (like Ubuntu)
Kdenlive can open 1080p60 and 1080p50 videos. Just create a new custom profile for 1080p60 and/or 1080p50 videos.

Kdenlive performance on a 1080p60 and 1080p50 AVCHD directly is going to be terrible!

There are some alternatives (suggested by Dan Dennedy):

1. Transcode your videos to 1080p30 220 Mb/s DNxHD. It is considered "near lossless," and its what AVID systems tend to use. Note that high bitrate can cause cracks/pops/playback issues on the timeline.
   Moreovrt DNxHD doesn't support 50/60p so you will always end up with lower framerate.
   
2. Proxy editing by transcoding your clips let's say to standard definition Raw DV or AVI DV and edit them with Kdenlive. Save the project, re-open it with a text editor, replace all ".dv" with ".mts" within the text file and save the project with another name.
   Then open this modified project with Kdenlive and render it with your original files using a custom project.
   
3. Transcode raw files with Avidemux to MJPEG (it maintains the framerate) and then import the MJPEG files to Kdenlive on a custom 1080p60 project. Playback, editing and rendering on the timeline is smooth (50/60p).

With options 2 and 3 you can have let's say a final file (MPEG-4/mp4/H.264) still at 50/60p, but edited and eventually compressed.