does it do any 24p variation? also does anyone use it with vegas 8 and does it work well or does it need to be converted to some other format to play?

Also in 1080i whats the bit rate? I saw on one video from a show thats its 6, but that sounds very low, should be around 13-15 I would think.

No 24P sorry- it does do 720P30!

Here are clips in 720P60-
http://stevenunez.com/xactihd1000/xacti.html

Sanyo states 12 but on certain scenes, it sometimes goes a little bit higher than that.