I just purchased a HDR-SR8E Handycam and Vegas 8 Pro. I had no problems installing all the software that came with the camera in my Vista 64 PC (only had to uninstall DirectX 9!) and everything was working very well, until I tried to edit the too shorts clips from the handycam in Vega, mainly to obtain a longer clip, and export the result to the disk . The video was quite unusable. Let alone the low quality (I wonder if the footage REALLY needs to be recompressed, even if no effects were applied to it!), but the worst was the apparition of very disturbing violet flashes in the lower part of the picture, particularly annoying when affecting white oblects. I also tested other formats and obtained good results (meaning that no violet flashes appeared) when exporting to Windows Media 720 and HDV, but the flashes were still there after exporting to a BluRay AVC file.
I think that the cause of this malfunction is the Sony AVCHD Codec 1.0, and don't think my 64bit Vista machine has anyhing to do with it, for the same problem occurred exporting AVCHD files form Nero Vision that both depends on the same codec and is fully compatible with 64 engines.