Actually The mid range products from Pinnacle do not support P2 or DVCpro 50 or HD yet.

I use Liquid Edition Pro and only with a $1000 add-on does it support DVCpro 50. There is currently no DVCpro HD support and who knows if there will be. Now maybe on a chrome or blue system there is but now you are talking well above $20,000 for an edit system. Even the Canopus system charges you an extra $1000 on top of the high cost of their HD system just for the P2 support and DVCpro HD.

Apple and AVID are currently the only companies that offer P2 and DVCpro HD support standard in their packages.

Now depending what AVID decides to do with Pinnacle this may change but it could be a few years from now when it does.

I expect Sony's Xpri system to support HD before Vegas does. That's the system that 'competes with the big boys'.

You mean DVCproHD? Vegas aready supports high def resolutions and formats, and has done since version 4.

The big two problems here are DVCpro50 and DVCproHD which is a simple thing to sort out as it is just a point of adding the codecs. The second, and most majort problem is making all NLE systems support the MXF format. At the present time it is only the higher end editors that support this both for XDCAM and P2 mainly because at the moment the only people using these systems are broadcasters.

Vegas was demonstrated at NAB taking MXF files straight from XDCAM onto the Vegas 6 timeline. So it shouldn't be too long, I hope, before both MXF wrappers are supported.

Anyway, I can't see how Sony Vegas could afford not to support MXF and DVCPRO,Actually Sony has supported MXF ever since the beginning (maybe even before Panasonic)... Sony's XDCAM format already uses the MXF file structure. That's one thing P2 and XDCAM have in common.

See http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/200404/04-0419aE/

Unfortunately as yet Vegas does not accept MXF files. The version of Vegas 6 they showed at NAB was for demonstration purposes only. I've got my fingers crossed I won't have to wait too long though.