When I first got my A1, I bought both ConnectHD and Gearshift. At first I thought I liked the Gearshift approach better. I found that both the m2t's and Gearshift proxies were smaller than the Cineform AVI's alone, and that the proxies played back really smoothly on my 1394 setup.

My views have changed however.

First, Vegas can only handle a limited number of m2t clips on a timeline at once.

Second, if you want to do audio edits on clips, working with proxies is akward.

Third, while the mpeg encoding looks pretty darned good on raw footage, crossfade transitions are more challenging and look blocky in mpeg.

Fourth, with the Gearshift/proxy approach you can't rename files as you edit. Thus you're stuck with names like "GSP_clip45.avi/clip45.m2t" instead of more descriptive names such as "artist interview 2.avi.

When you go to backup the whole project, with the Cineform approach you can save trimmed media with project. Boy do I miss that when backing up a Gearshift edited project.

So I've switched to working with the Cineform Codec for the most part. Some good things aren't obvious at first look I suppose.