I have not seen much in the last couple of weeks on general opinions on NEO. I use Vegas 7 and have just gotten Premiere Pro CS3, and am not having any real problems with either.

Is there any real advantage to getting NEO?

Buddy

Initially, I bought NeoHDV because I wanted the 24p pulldown capability and the flip capability for my HV20, Letus combination. That alone makes it worthwhile. But in addition.....

I have an early dual core AMD system (3800+ as I recall.) When editing HDV in Vegas, I note that playback is sputtery, the previews are poor and sound seems a bit out of synch, and the experience is just not that great in large projects. I just finished a reedit of a 48 Hour Film project, using both "native" HDV and Cineform files, and it is clear where the benefit of Cineform is, with my set up. Editing is just so much more trouble free in the Cineform codec

Now in PPro 2.0, I don't recall having as much of an issue with "native" HDV as with Vegas. I think that may be due to the fact that Premiere does try to use your video card resources too. Back about a year ago when I edited HDV with Premiere, I feel like I got pretty good performance. Recently my emphasis has been on Vegas, and I haven't compared performances since I got NeoHDV.

I'm just at the point of investing in Neo, and one of the points that swayed my decision was the posting from yesterday, "Image sharpness rendering to Cineform." I use Vegas also, and it seems that you can only get "medium" sharpness with the Cineform codec you get with Vegas, while with Neo you have several other settings (High, Filmscan 1 & 2). After all, isn't a sharp picture much of the point?