Okay, I would like to know which of you HV20 owners are Sony Vegas users as well - and do you edit your HV20 footage as M2T or use Cineform to convert it to an intermediate for editing? I know that Vegas will work with multiple files and capture formats, so one can just use the 24p within the 60i files without "having to" extract the 24p frames.

But...it still seems that Vegas is slow and sluggish playing back M2T files - and I tried an experiment of copying the same M2T files to 4 different hard drives on my system (2 PATA and 2 SATA) and then opening just that single file in Vegas to see if the hard drive performance would help, but M2T still plays back sluggish regardless of which hard drive the files are streaming from.

Whereas, the Cineform intermediate plays back smoothly - as would be expected (and not to overlook the fact of all the other benefits that Cineform offers).

What is the workflow of you fellow HV20/Vegas users?

time to get cineform or a new pc with core2 duo 6600 or quad core

Using a trial copy of Vegas (former Elements user). I've had no problem capturing and playing back m2t files straight from the camera. I've yet to capture more than a couple minutes, and I've yet to do any heavy editing -- but, thus far, I haven't noticed a problem. It handles m2t much better than Elements.

time to get cineform or a new pc with core2 duo 6600 or quad coreThis is a new system already. AMD 64 X2 Dual Core 5600+ (2.82gHz), 4GB RAM, Vista Home Premium.

Nathan:

If I am looking for maximum image quality, I will use Cineform to capture and do pull down at the outset, and render everything in that. I have actually been astounded at the clarity of the final renders. If you actually render them in the HD 1920x1080 format, they seem even better, if that is technically possible.You are correct that the Cineform intermediate file plays back great, when you finalize a project.

I find that with .mt2 I get some weird effects in certain situations on the edges, like a halo. I think it has to do with the codec, and the video card's interpretation, because those same issues do not seem to appear on the playback of Cineform files, or even on .wmv or quicktime files.

If project is for something like a web posting, like the UWOL Challenge on this forum, what I find myself doing to save disk space is capturing M2t files using HDVsplit. Then I do the edit of the project in M2T and render out to a m2t file, still in the HDV 29.97 format. I then convert that using NEOHDV to the Cineform intermediate format, using pulldown removal, ending up with the 24p file for Render to other formats.

So flexibility is what is offered in Vegas, which I, previously a confirmed Premiere user, have been using more and more because it seems to do a better job of providing flexibility in the rendering process.

UPDATE: Well, looks like I can get better and smoother playback with the M2T files. I started messing around with the Video Preview options in Vegas, since there are several to choose from and also you can "match aspect ratio" to the preview window size. Well, it seems that when you do that and video preview is at some odd aspect ratio that is not scaled to be an even multiple of the original footage, then the playback preview suffers.

I guess this makes some sense that video preview should really be scaled to match the original footage size or else it requires more CPU power to preview at non-matched sizes. At least that's the best guess I can come up with. But I get paid today and some money is going back into the editing system. So I think buying NeoHDV is going to happen today. I had thought about getting the Intensity card (not the pro version) since it was the same price as getting NeoHDV, because I thought that would solve these M2T sluggish playback issues (till I discovered better preview settings to use in Vegas). But, I had been thinking that I would get realtime preview out the Intensity card going in to my HDTV. But I've already read in the forums that the Intensity is not yet compatible with Sony Vegas for previewing. So it looks like the money will be going to Cineform for now.

If project is for something like a web posting, like the UWOL Challenge on this forum, what I find myself doing to save disk space is capturing M2t files using HDVsplit. Then I do the edit of the project in M2T and render out to a m2t file, still in the HDV 29.97 format. I then convert that using NEOHDV to the Cineform intermediate format, using pulldown removal, ending up with the 24p file for Render to other formats.Hey Chris, thanks for posting this particular workflow - it never even crossed my mind to consider doing things like that. Yes, it seems like another good alternative option to convert to Cineform at the very last. Ah...nothing better than more than one way to do things.