I thought that if I was shooting in 29.97 on both cameras that the footage would appear on the sequence timeline as identical, but if I establish a Sequence with settings based on the FS100 footage, when I paste a clip from the VG10 it appears with a "red" bar over the clip, and needs to be rendered for full quality viewing. As far as I know, both record AVCHD files and I'm using the raw .mts version in both cases so I'm not sure why they aren't treated the same on the same sequence. Any ideas? Thanks..

FWIW, I'm using PP5.5 on a MacBook Pro 17" I7 8G RAM.

As far as I know VG-10 only shoots 1080i60 - interlaced footage. Your FS-100 might have been set to record progressive 1080p30, thus the problem.

I think you're right, the sequence setting for the VG10 footage show "upper field first" and the FS100 shows "none, progressive". For some reason I thought I could get 30p out of the VG10, guess I was wrong...thanks,

The VG10 does shoot 30p, but it is 30 PsF which means it is in a 60i wrapper.
The trick is to get PPro to recombine the 60i fields back into 30p progressive frames.
Then the footage will go onto a 30p timeline with no need to render.
The big problem is if PPro applies a "deinterlace" algorithm to the footage in order to get it to 30p.
This will cause the image quality to be degraded.
PsF is a tricky topic, and it's commonly used by many cameras.
Allan Tepper has published a 10 part series on this topic- check it out here:
ProVideo Coalition.com: TecnoTur by Allan Tépper (http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/atepper/story/psf8217s_missing_workflow_em_part_1_benign_psf_versus_malignant_psf/)

That is great information, I'm checking out the link now. Being able to use VG10 footage in a 30fps sequence without rendering will be a tremendous help. Thanks for the link and the info.

So it turns out the VG-10 records "malignant PsF" which is not recognized by PP5.5 as progressive, so it needs to be "told" via the 'interpret footage' menu to be 'not by field-progressive'. That's a complete fix and I can now edit with the FS100 footage seamlessly.

What a great forum :) Thanks...