I have managed to capture the footage using Sony (whatever it's called) version 8. I would have preferred PP CS3 if it would pick up the camera correctly. But thats another story.

Once the footage is captured and saved as an m2t file what is the best way to edit and play with the footage without losing anymore quality than the already compressed file. (Dam I wish these cameras outputted RAW data, but then we would all need RAID arrays in our bedrooms!).

I.e I edit together a sequence from different footage all shot with the A1. I then need to get this over into After Effects to overlay some graphics, i.e me holding a light saber or something else geeky like that. (oh come on! I'm sure we've all tried it at some point!?). Is it wise to compress the video at all before it gets to AE or leave it uncompressed from Premier?? Not sure if anyone can help. I guess compressing the footage twice would be a bad idea so maybe I have just answered my own question.

This created huge uncompressed files though? Does anyone have any better thoughts or processes?

Export a version of your edited footage and load it into AE. Then create whatever graphics / animation you want on another layer. You are just using the footage you loaded into AE to line up your graphics. Once you have it the way you want, remove the edited footage, and render the graphics/animation with an alpha channel. Then load your graphics into Premier and overlay it on your original edited footage. Now when you render the final output, you're only recompressing once.

In Premiere Pro I used Cineform to convert HDV to lossless intermediate codec, now in FCP there is the Apple intermediate codec included which does the same thing: covert the footage into frame compressed format during the capture, which then can be edited and manipulated with minimal quality penalties. The downside is file size; files about triple in size to 35 GB/hour. But editing is actually faster as the editor can do all the calculations with the compressed frames like in the good old DV25.

Does Cineform work with Vegas? I do not know. It should work with After Effects.

Export a version of your edited footage and load it into AE. Then create whatever graphics / animation you want on another layer. You are just using the footage you loaded into AE to line up your graphics. Once you have it the way you want, remove the edited footage, and render the graphics/animation with an alpha channel. Then load your graphics into Premier and overlay it on your original edited footage. Now when you render the final output, you're only recompressing once.

Nice method thanks. Didn't think of this one yet as haven't really played with real footage. I know that Quicktime export uncompressed with Millions+ is the best for this alpha channel incorporated into single file. Cheers for the advice!