I tried to use my captured footage from Vegas (.m2t files from my hv20) but it doesn't recognize it in AE CS3. Any ideas besides rendering it out, how to use these files in AE?

you are all good once you get to CS4, spose that doesnt help though, hey :)
I use to change the extension to mpeg, it worked sometimes, other times the clip would go offline and sometimes not come back.
IMO, just render to Lagarith and be done with it.

Thank you.