O.K, What about Sony's DV codec/Microsoft DV codec?
Will they cause a decrease in the quality?

Sony’s DV codec is not accessible to other programs so that’s not an option. Since any DV codec will use lossy compression, information will be lost. Will you see a difference? Maybe. If you want to guarantee no loss then use uncompressed or a lossless codec like Huffyuv as was suggested. I use the free Panasonic DV codec for going between applications and I don’t see any difference because it’s usually only one generation (i.e., out to an FX program and back into Vegas).

~jr

I used Deshaker quite extensively on a recent project. About 1/3 of the clips I rendered with the free Panasonic DV codec, the remaining 2/3 I did using the Main Concept DV codec. I must say there is a noticable difference between the two. On an average 21 inch TV set you can't even see it, but if you watch your footage on a big widescreen TV it just kind of jumps out at you. What I see are little wormlike artifacts with the Panasonic DV codec.

I would spring the $50 for the Main Concepts DV codec. Once you do, don't forget to go into the preferences and uncheck the "fast rendering" tab. If you don't it will look much worse than the free Panasonic codec even.

The Main Concepts DV codec looks a little different than the Vegas one. What I see is an ever so slightly darker color. None the less, for working outside of Vegas it is the best option. The Huffy lossless codec changes the color ever so slightly as well.

What I noticed using the Huffy codec, is that when all was said and done, I had just as many DV renders as I did when I used the Main Concept DV codec. Lossless is fine, but at some point you need to go back to straight DV codec anyway. Usually, by the time you do you haven't gained anything overall. Don't forget that with Vegas's smart rendering, you are only rerendering what you need to. If you use the Main Concepts DV codec with VDub and Deshaker on a clip, then put that clip back in a Vegas project, then render a final DV avi, that VDub corrected section will not have been rerendered in the final avi unless you added something like color correction or an aspect ratio change. If you used the Huffy codec for that same section, it would have been rerenderd. Either way, you're looking at the same number of DV generations.

Even if you make a change that requires rerendering, the Vegas and Main Concept DV codecs are designed for many generations. You can go a 100 generations if you have to and barely see any difference. That is a pretty stark contrast to the Microsoft DV codec for instance where after about 4 generations you can hardly even recognize the picture!

One can't use AVI uncompressed in both programs?
Just asking

Yes you can render out of pretty much any program using an uncompressed codec. I think the reason why the suggestion to use a codec such as HuffyYUV is that it uses lossless compression, which'll save on discspace.

Another idea, if all you want to do is assemble your footage in Vegas and then bring it into AE (i.e. no effects), you might want to look into this plugin for AE:

http://www.forgedimages.com/vegasimportorder.html

It's a $5.00 plugin for AE that can open Vegas EDLs and convert them into AE comps. Seriously powerful plugin for the price. It makes assembling footage before sending it to AE for enhancement very quick and easy.

I am pretty sure I read here a while back that you can frameserve with DebugMode from Vegas into AE. I tried it once to see and it did open the file and play it in AE - but not having had the time to learn AE I never followed through to see any results. I guess you still have to determine how to render after you are finished in AE but at least framesserving eliminates rendering before AE...

I am less likely to use AE now that V6 has nested projects, but I've had very good luck frameserving out from Vegas to AE, using DebugMode's frameserver plug-in. From AE to Vegas, I render to uncompressed .AVI. Works great!

>>> I am pretty sure I read here a while back that you can frameserve with DebugMode from Vegas into AE. <<<

Yes you can. I do it all the time. For me it was/is to use AE plugs - Satish at one time was going to do some sort of AE Plug-in adaptor for Vegas but i guess when RED 3 came out he nuked the idea because Red interfaces with vegas and you can use AE plugs in Red. But for now framserving works great. The main issue however is going *back* to vegas - either you have to make AE your final stop or you need to render out of AE so you can import back to Vegas and than render again.