It's DVCProHD.

CineAlta Varicam -- I think it's DVCProHD.

Some confusion there.
The CineAlta is a Sony and it's HDCAM.
The Varicam is Panasonic and it's DVCPRO HD.

Mike

First a few clarafications - if you are shooting video you need not worry about "matchback". That is mainly a film term and you would only have to worry about that if you shot film, had it transfered to video, cut it and than had to go back and conform the neg to your video/NLE cut. But for that you wouls also need TC and film edge numbers not to mention matchback software - Vegas doesn't really offer this.

EDL wise - For the most part forget about it in reguards to Vegas being able to deal with it. If you are doing cuts only and keep all your cpatured media in the same folder you might be able to get away with it. Anything else will be very hit and miss.

Timecode - if you capture in FCP don't expect Vegas to be able to read any TC info. And vice versa. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas...TC wise that is.

AAF - can't really comment that much but from what I hear that works better than an EDL as far as vegas goes but is still "new" and can be more of a mess between platforms. Somewhere Spot posted some really good info about the whole AAF format and this issues it has.

My suggestion might be to just go ahead and cut in FCP and than use Vegas to finish. Or if you really only want to "play" at home make a 1:1 copy of all the FCP footage but at DV rez. Bring the DV stuff home, edit away do whatever else you need to do - when you are done just replace the DV footage drive with the orginal HD footage. However - not sure if Vegas deals with DVCproHD yet if that is what you will have.

AAF or Advanced Authoring Format is a mess. XML is more intelligent, but is much more rare. Ironically, Vegas has it, FCP has it, but they don't talk to each other at this point in time.
AAF doesn't even work very well in the AVID-only world where it's supposed to be picture perfect.
If you have the DVCProHD codec, you'll be able to open/edit in Vegas.
FCP can read the EDL file from Vegas.

I've played around with AAF, Vegas, and FCP. AAF for FCP comes from a free but hard to find download from the Automatic Duck people.
I got vegas to open a FCP AAF file, but it seemed to mess up a/v sync. Need to do more experimentation on this end. I tried both types of AAF files from Vegas and both made FCP crash trying to open.
I'm curious to try the plain old edls as Spot mentioned. I have opened a FCP edl in Vegas, but that edl was from a friend and I have no idea how he worked the settings.
Cui Bono is another option, but I'm still not sure if that is audio only.

Talking about XML, is there a standard XML format for NLEs ? Because XML alone is nothing... It's simply a way to structure data.

Unfortunately, there is no standard (that I'm aware of). There is the FCP XML, and there is Vegas XML, and I imagine others will have their own XML. It's a matter of mapping one attribute to another. Which isn't an easy or fast task.

Just sort of an FYI on the XML front - Premiere Pro saves all projects in XML format. As Musman pointed out it is just a way to format - sort of like HTML in a way. The problem is, to the best of my understanding, unlike HTML, XML isn't really "common" in that everything that handles XML doesn't read "all" XML. For example try to import a PPro project via the Vegas XML script - it won't work. That script is looking for the Vegas XML formating. I would guess it is the same for the FCP format and so on.

And to me, sounding like a broken record, the great thing about EDL was/is that is is "easy" - you have an "in" and and "out" on both the source and record sides. Dissolves and fades can be worked in as well if need be. yes it is basic, bbut it works. XML is more like a script in that you can define anything you want - it doesn't really need to follow anything. You can mark the in point anyway you want - <inpoint></inpoint> , <in></in>, <VideoInPoint></VideoInPoint>, <SourceInPoint></SourceInPoint> - you get my idea. So the idea would be to get every NLE's XML output and than compare and somene come up with yet another "format coversion" program to handle it all.

The X is XML stands for eXtensible which is computer scientist's way of saying custom. So if you see XML just think custom markup language. You can create "valid" XML which means that the XML conforms to either a DTD or a schema. A DTD is the old way of doing it and it stands for a Document Type Definition. A schema is similiar to the idea of a database schema, but essentially it works like a DTD but it is actually written in XML, whereas DTDs had a different format.

A DTD or Schema can be whatever you want it to be. So Apple did one and Vegas did another. Getting these two formats to talk to each other is the job of XSL, which is eXtensible Stylesheet Language. It can be used to transform XML into HTML or a different form of XML. So the format conversion program filmy mentions would essentially be a collection of XSL stylesheets.