No, it is not lossless. It is very good though, as you can see.

Record audio separately.

The AV jack can output audio during recording, if you use Magic Lantern firmware. With most headphones, you need a headphone amplifier, like the Boostaroo.

So if the converting of the raw .MOV files out of the camera is NOT lossless using Neoscene, it's only function then is to improve the playback while editing?

If I were wanting to keep the best quality, wouldn't it just be better to import the raw .MOV files into Sony Vegas and then 'render as' whatever format I choose?

I know this question has no real answer, but for the most part, what type of file association are you rendering to that gives you the HD quality look that I'm seeing on examples such as... Zelo Cinema Sample Clips on Vimeo ?????

Is the final product rendered into a FLV file? If so, using what format/codec?

That is one of it's functions

That is an option. But it would be nearly impossible to tell the difference between lossless and cineform with your naked eye. You're talking about a codec that was used for capture and edit for an Oscar winner last year. It's pretty darn good man.

If you are finishing to anything other than 35mm film (and maybe even for that) Cineform is as good as uncompressed, without the pain. Vimeo... forget it. AVCHD would be good enough.

The cool thing about Cineform is that the codec is "visually lossless", and that it plays back with low overhead. You can also scale the output to half or quarter size for real time playback very effectively, due to its wavelet coding. By scaling smaller, you leave more CPU for color correction and effects.

Often people use an intermediate format which is visually lossless in addition to low-res proxies, which play back easily. With Cineform, you get both characteristics from one file.

So in 'newbie' terms, once the raw file is in Sony Vegas 8.0, when I'm ready to render, what file type and codec should I be using to get this kick-butt quality I'm seeing?

I encode to Sony AVC, 1280x720 at 4Mbps. Audio is AAC at 128 kbps.

But I never put the raw files into Vegas. NeoScene has no negative effect on quality and makes editing a joy.

In fact, the levels will be incorrect if you put the RAW files into Vegas. At a minimum, you need to "rewrap" the MOV files to an MP4 file in Quicktime so that Vegas decodes the correct levels without contouring problems. NeoScene eliminates the MOV decoding bug.

Will rendering to Sony AVC file format give you the best quality for YouTube and Vimeo uploads for sharing video?

EDIT: No luck rendering to Sony AVC, as I cannot get the file to play back on my computer. Any thoughts?

You might try uploading it anyway. As long as Vimeo can decode it, they will put it in a format that Flash can play from your browser.

I've uploaded sony avc to vimeo just fine. But it plays back on my commputer just fine too.

Finally got some basic test footage uploaded to Vimeo using their tutorial. I rendered via MainConcept H.264 and it looks okay, not anything to write home about..........

Untitled on Vimeo

Looks about as good as one could expect. Good job.

HD video o Vimeo is 1280x720 H.264 at 5Mbps so for best picture quality you should convert your video to that specification before uploading.

Why is that?

Nigel,

That's exactly what I did, per the Vimeo tutorial. I used Sony Vegas 8.0 and rendered the avi files as a MainConcept .mp4 file with those settings... 1280 X 720, etc. etc.
Once that file was rendered out, I then uploaded onto Vimeo website.

* Wonder if it would have been better to render in 1920 X 1080 on the MainConcept .mp4 file instead ???