Color Correction Advice

[Mark Holmes]

Firstly, thanks for any advice people give on this.
We're in the final stages of a feature project, and I spent some time last night color correcting (mild stuff, slight adjustment to curves, B/W filter to desaturate, slight adjustment with secondary color coorector) all done directly to DVCPro HD files via Raylight plugin in Vegas Pro 8 at 32-bit.
It looks good, but there are some slight artifacting problems, I'm assuming because the adjustments are happening in such a compressed space. I've read in Stu Maschwitz's DV Rebel book that the best post workflow is to output all untouched files to an image sequence and do all the work in After Effects. We have access to AE but given our unfamiliarity with the program and the simple work we plan on doing, it seems to be overkill. And now that Vegas does processing in a 32-bit space, we would like to do all the post work in Vegas.
So this leads to my real question: What is the best workflow for getting our final edits into a less compressed space to do CC in? Render our to Cineform, re-cut at the edits and CC? Render out to image sequence? What do you all do? Any personal examples, examples of footage, etc., are welcome.
And one note: this footage will be seen in theaters, at least at festivals, possible with a small theatrical run. It has to look as clean as possible...

[John Rofrano]

Internally Vegas is working in the 4:4:4 color space and you're right that with the new 32-bit options in Vegas Pro 8.0 there is no reason why not to stay in Vegas for all of your post-processing unless you need to do something that Vegas doesn't do. If I've got to take my HD footage out of Vegas I will use the Cineform codec because it has less compression than the original footage and maintains the same quality. If you are doing a lot of post-processing in Vegas you might also want to render out to Cineform so that any re-rendering maintains the highest quality possible.

Are you seeing artifacting on the final render or just in the Vegas preview? It's probably worth rendering a sample to the final format just to make sure of what you have since the final codec that you use will also add some compression.

~jr