Raylight Ultra
 

Raylight Ultra was released this week (Monday). It is a major-rewrite of the Raylight codec and the plugin for Vegas has some new features. You can import up to 4 audio tracks, there is a virtual metadata "Slate" so you can view P2 metadata in the preview window, and some P2 metadata items are translated into Vegas metadata so you can search for them in Media Manager, etc. See Raylight Ultra

If you have the old Raylight plugin you can upgrade to Ultra, and it is backward compatible.

In the coming months there will also be some updates to Ultra for Vegas 8.1 support and also AVC-Intra native editing.

How is Raylight Ultra's size, quality, preview efficiency, rendering speed and quality after multiple renders as compared to the Cineform codec? Does Raylight work in VirtualDub and AVISynth?

Those are good questions but the wavelet technology of Cineform is going to be superior to any DVCPROHD codec including Raylight for most of those criteria. Raylight Ultra is for people who primarily want to edit P2 MXF files DIRECTLY in the Vegas timeline, possibly access the metadata, something which is more convenient than using an intermediate codec and which Cineform does not do AFAIK. As an intermediate codec I think Cineform is an excellent product.

Raylight can also do non-recompressed editing which gives better results than any recompression method no matter how good since with no recompression there is absolutely zero loss (of course this excludes frames with dissolves, corrections or effects).

Raylight is a VfW codec and it should work with Virtual dub, etc but we do not qualify it for that function here.

Here is a page we created which shows the Raylight recompression quality:
Recompression with Raylight

This page was created with the old Raylight codec but it applies to Ultra as well.