you can convert to Canopus HQ. the codec is free,

As with all codecs, the quality of MXF is related to the bitrate used. Use a high enough bitrate and any codec looks stellar.

I've encoded some of the 1080i AVCHD .mts files from my camcorder to MXF at 25Mbps and they look very very good. At 50Mbps they look amazing. At 18Mbps they start showing some grittieness around high contrast pixels.

Also, you might want to check out XDCAM .mp4. It's the same mpeg2 video with uncompressed audio that is used in the Sony XDCAM .mxf format, but without the 24 bit audio and 50 Mbps video bitrates options. It performs like XDCAM .mxf and in fact you can even smart render between these two formats (and HDV m2t as well) because the video compression is identical.

The free Cineform codec can be downloaded here, it's basically the equivalent of the old Cineform Neoscene. It can be used to encode and decode in Vegas.

http://gopro.com/3d-cineform-studio-software-download/

GoPro John??

Cineform is now part of GoPro.

Pinnacle Studio is no longer Avid but Corel.

And so on...

I did find that GoPro Cineform yesterday.... I don't want to loose quality... what is the lossless format VEGAS works with most efficiently? I know nothing about Cineform but just the NAME of it makes it sound like a good, stable, industry standard one. :)

My computer doesn't have a ton of power so I want to as efficient as possible without degrading any quality. I will live with choppy if I have to, to avoid loosing any quality.

For current clients we have been shipping-out projects using the AVID DNxHD (mov) @ 220Mbps but also provide 145Mbps DNxHD, Cineform, or BlackMagic's M-JPEG 422 if clients request it. We can also create ProRes HQ (222 Mbps) files by exporting via frame server... We do not send highly compressed MP4/H.264 (18 Mbps) to clients who are going to edit the video further.

We have found that on slower systems Blackmagic's Motion-JPEG codec (1920x1080 AVI @ 50-70Mbps & 4:2:2 color) is less CPU intensive so it does not bog-down. Even if you do not have Blackmagic's Decklink or Intensity cards you can install the drivers which installs the codecs. (We have the codecs installed on all of our workstations, even the ones that do not have the BM hardware cards...) I like the way that M-JPEG preserves the individual frame data within the video stream. Not everyone is a fan of the older M-JPEG codec, but Blackmagic's version is pretty good and was highly praised on this forum just a few years ago.

All of these codecs are considered lossy but you need to have a beefy system to work with uncompressed HD (367+ Mbps). We have two RAIDs on our workstations that handle 400Mbps+ reads & writes, so Vegas can utilize 100% of the CPU during editing. We still have a few clients who will only accept uncompressed HD, so we aim to please...

wow this place is full of relevant information! Glad I signed up now. Thanks for this feedback, guys and maybe gals!

Do clients ever accept HuffYUV or Lagarith? These codecs use lossless compression and create somewhat smaller files than uncompressed.

Not sure which Vegas version you use. Since the latest Vegas Pro 10 builds and the current Vegas Pro 11 actually Vegas Pro is optimized for decoding Canon DSLR MOV files, which means for this certain kind of files Vegas no longer goes the way through Quicktime decoder but uses it's on H.264 decoder.
So such Canon DSRL MOV files work ways better now since it did until the early 10er builds.

I'm on 11, but have read here that MOV is not the most efficient format and conversion to something better helps? I need to do some tests to see if it would help me. I get lots of stutter on review unless watching in a tiny draft mode, and I have done all the optimizations recommended. But, I'm a hobbyist and my computer sucks and I know it. old 3.2 hyper threading (not dual core) 2gig ram max and yet I can edit HD video :) pretty well. Trying to maximize without spending sadly. I know, I know I NEED to upgrade to really edit HD, but it is mostly working and I'm not too worried about it.

Can I assume that all the info given here are also valid for AVCHD files from GH2?
Thanks.

Just got my GH2, so just starting to experiment. Just straight MXF files run great on my V 8.0 on my old 3.2 hyperthreading machine, so that's what I may use. MXF is free and part of V8. I have the free GoPro Cineform codec also, it seems to run slower than MXF, to me. The straight out of the camera videos work, but it is not usable at all on my setup.

I basically just use the MXF for intermediates, I usually switch back to the orig for final render. I still sometimes even use DV intermediates when I'm in a hurry!

Way overdue for a new machine, will happen by Christmas.