I had asked for help on this a few days ago and I just wanted to report my results.
I did manage to sucessfully get my DVCPro HD footage from a Panasonic 1200a deck into Vegas Pro 8. I tried two different methods that were available to me and both worked. As I have an Avid Media Composer setup (v.2.72) I was able to ingest the DVCPro footage into the Avid with no problems. For expediency's sake, I output the footage from Avid to an HDV m2t file. Vegas was able to read this file perfectly, albeit slowly as it had to scan it completely at first to inspect it (I suppose). NOTE. After upgrading to the new m2tplug.dll file from Sony, Vegas now has no problem reading these m2t's that Avid spits out. And to be fair to Vegas, even before the new dll, no other program I tried could successfully import an Avid generated m2t, and that includes Final Cut Studio 2 and Premiere CS3.
Since I had the DVCPro rental deck here, I decided to be double safe and I ingested the footage into Final Cut Studio 2 as well. No real problems there, although FCS was much more finicky, seeing time code breaks and timecode mismatches that the Avid didn't concern itself with. I finally managed to complete the 2 tape ingest and I tried out the Raylight Encoder Pro demo. Worked perfectly, Vegas was able to deal with the dvcpro quicktime mov's without a hitch. The audio on the FCS side was not correct however, but since I had no audio to speak of of these tapes, it was of no concern, although this would obviously be a big concern on other types of footage. Not sure if they're insurmountable but I was very pleased to be able to get both of these options working with Vegas.
At first glance, the m2t's from the Avid seem to look a little sharper but that's purely subjective at this point. I will probably end up using the Avid stuff as I would need to buy Raylight to use those files so it's hard to justify the money if I have a usable solution. But Raylight sure does what it says it can do, and effortlessly, too.
I did manage to sucessfully get my DVCPro HD footage from a Panasonic 1200a deck into Vegas Pro 8. I tried two different methods that were available to me and both worked. As I have an Avid Media Composer setup (v.2.72) I was able to ingest the DVCPro footage into the Avid with no problems. For expediency's sake, I output the footage from Avid to an HDV m2t file. Vegas was able to read this file perfectly, albeit slowly as it had to scan it completely at first to inspect it (I suppose). NOTE. After upgrading to the new m2tplug.dll file from Sony, Vegas now has no problem reading these m2t's that Avid spits out. And to be fair to Vegas, even before the new dll, no other program I tried could successfully import an Avid generated m2t, and that includes Final Cut Studio 2 and Premiere CS3.
Since I had the DVCPro rental deck here, I decided to be double safe and I ingested the footage into Final Cut Studio 2 as well. No real problems there, although FCS was much more finicky, seeing time code breaks and timecode mismatches that the Avid didn't concern itself with. I finally managed to complete the 2 tape ingest and I tried out the Raylight Encoder Pro demo. Worked perfectly, Vegas was able to deal with the dvcpro quicktime mov's without a hitch. The audio on the FCS side was not correct however, but since I had no audio to speak of of these tapes, it was of no concern, although this would obviously be a big concern on other types of footage. Not sure if they're insurmountable but I was very pleased to be able to get both of these options working with Vegas.
At first glance, the m2t's from the Avid seem to look a little sharper but that's purely subjective at this point. I will probably end up using the Avid stuff as I would need to buy Raylight to use those files so it's hard to justify the money if I have a usable solution. But Raylight sure does what it says it can do, and effortlessly, too.