For the purposes of smooth Previewing, does/can Edius Neo or Edius 5 run multi-tracks, transitions, effects etc on a system at 1280x720p without pre-rendering? Is there ANY kind of rendering going on in the background?
my initial findings with my winery project are as follows:
1) If Cineform is installed on your machine, it will read the transcoded AVI's.
2) Transitions with the AVI's slow down dramatically until past the transition (a simple dissolve in my case)
3) Not sure if it is rendering in the background, but I do know it seems to play back alot smoother for me right now than VP9 does. I'm not willing to revert back to a 32bit version of Vegas since I work on a 64bit OS and want to exploit the abilities of Vegas Pro 9 64bit as well.
FWIW...
I own vegas, edius5 and avid media composer 4.04. media composer is the hands down winner on all counts! playback is realtime, problem free. it's true that media composer costs more, but, for a professional business application, you get what you pay for. the latest release of media composer will accept multiple frame rates on the same timeline. the bundled plugins for media composer aren't as good as vegas, however, boris continuum complete and izotope ozone are more than adequate. finally, while media composer is, currently, not qualified to run on win7/64, I'm running it without a problem on a quad-core intel mobo and quadro fx1700. win7-64 certification is coming, soon.
as a digital professional, you really cant beat after effects, media composer and a cineform combination. media composer provides a seamless integration of XDCAM HD 422 video format and will soon upgrade to integrate Cineform intermediates.
vegas is a great little app for quick jobs, but, for that serious project, media composer has my full recommendation.