First off I just want to say how much reading your posts here have helped me with my video projects. You guys have been lifesavers on numerous questions. The advice I have gotten here has been invaluable to me. Now it seems that I am a victim of perhaps too much information.
I want to edit my footage from my HD-1 on as close to realtime as I can get. I currently have a 2.8 pentium-4 with a 750 megs of ram, and a 120 gig hard drive.I have downloaded tons of encoders, decoders, editing software, from Womble, tmpgenc3.0 express,wm9, a demo of aspect hd and the list goes on. I guess what i want to know is what is the best method to use for compressing my hd footage. I am still having some trouble with programs such as tmpgenc 3.0 recognizing my .M2t files. I have the editing software that came with the camera but I can't even add an audio bed beneath my video with that program.
I understand that Aspect HD is supposed to works great, but I only have that for a limited period of time, and I can't even get Adobe Premiere to recognize my >m2t files. I am pretty sure I have what I need, but I am not quite sure what the best way is to go about what I want to do.

Help I am drowning in codecs!

Aspect HD doesn't try to make m2t files compatibile with Premiere and for good a reason (it is very slow to edit HD MPEG.) The CineForm approach converts the hard to use M2Ts into a faster and more convient AVIs during the capture process (on a modern PC this operation at the same time as capture -- i.e. zero conversion time.) If you already have M2T files captured with other tools, you can convert these to AVIs using the HDLink application that ships with Aspect HD (the second tab get to the conversion panel.)

Hope this helps.

I use ConnectHD and life is MUCH better than it was before it with Vegas anyways.

I was really worried about what I felt was steep pricing but since I have done 4 projects since at the same speed as I would with normal DV, it was worth every penny, as long as patches keep coming to upgrade it and keep it smooth as possible

The one or two things I would like to see though are a preview window as well as being able to size my window maybe I can do these 2 things now and have not dug deep enough