I'm currently working on some projects using HDV content. I would like to find out if anyone else out there is working with HD footage and on what kind of systems?
I do this, but I convert the vid to DV first, edit the DV 'offline' and then replace the DV with HD and render. I showed this at the NAB show in the Artbeats booth on a laptop. works wonderfully.
I find that the 1920x1080 and 1280x720 formats both work OK on my modern 160GB IDE drives and RAM+CPU when I transcode them to PICvideo MJPEG, Q=17. I transcode them at their full res and they scrub quite nicely, not as nicely if I have many layers and much in the way of PNG or uncompressed tracks. Yet similar enough to DV and more representative of the finished product and it gives me a kick too ;-) . Fast RAM is the secret, you should have a touted dual channel DDR or RDRAM PC to handle this extra load fluidly.
The PICvideo codec is about $18 for personal use, it also is available in an older OEM version inside ShowShifter.com's PVR, I guess for any use. I think the freeware MJPEG from the Matrox digisuite standalone codecs also works but at some expense to the purity of your Windows video subsystem in some peoples reports. Mine hasn't coughed but this is DigiSuite standlone codecs, not the RT2x00/RTX standlones. (by standalone, I mean without the manufacturers I/O card that sports its own hardware locked/interactive versions)
If reprocessing MPEG-2-TS into MJPEG and then once again is a problem. You can still replace the MJPEG.AVI with the original HDV transport streams.
Sony are working on a means to set the MainConcept MPEG-2 rendering to support export in the stream format the camera/deck needs. Otherwise that remains a 3rd party step.
My target is HD WMV9 on a DVD or sometimes MPEG-2.mpg.
Vegas rocks.
For multiple file transcodes, I adapted my amateur workflow to do it much as the professional SPOT does, through the timeline. I'd liked to have seen BatchConverter5 updated into Vegas, but a script writer could probably give you an interface for conversion using the Vegas engine.
I'm jealous that you have an HDV camera. I'm doing time lapse and stop animation with a digital camera. A "budget amateur".