Two questions: would love thoughts from all but especially Segraves, Newman or Brown.
1) I am shooting with hacked GH1 and GH2, and using Neo>First Light>Sony Vegas. I'm thrilled, without resorting to the Sony levels switch I can see what I'm getting and color grading is fun again. Now.. recently Canon has gone to the Techicolor low contrast profile and you have provided a great LUT to decode it. But is this the way to go? Because my camera is 8-bit: if I shoot with very low contrast/ no sharpen/ low saturation the theroy is I can capture an expanded range and correct later. But I know from still photography that if I shoot in a 8 bit format post correction can cause gradation and artifacting.. it is much better to shoot as close to final product as possible (different story when I shoot in raw at 14-bit-still). Is 8 enough bits to tolorate large gamma shifts.
2) As mentioned I use Vegas that is known for crappy MP4 implimentation. Current wisdom on the Sony forum is to convert to Avid HD codec then import to Handbreak. I would prefer to stay in a Cineform enviroment. Is there a stand alone good encoder for Cineform (AVI or MOV) to h264 or x264 anywhere? WARNING God did not endow me with the brains for programs like MeGUI.
Thankful for all feedback.

Cineform is the best solution for you.

i'm too the owner of gh2, and i managed many other videoreflex, like 5d, 7d, 60d, and more...
photo and video are two different "dog", but about color correction the best is to have flat and smooth info, with best of range, also if you shoot at 8bit, be cause in both situation you have more space where work, and more space where edit your photo or video.

when you convert by hdlink gh2 video to cineform you have more space to work in color correction, and is better than other limited codec. When you correct video by firstlight you a precision that you cannot replicate directly in an application like vegas with post plugin, be cause you not have enought color precision to do that (vegas is an editor, not a finishing software).

gh2 start far away from canon be cause it encode with a better quality and allow you to grab more info during shooting than canon ... a talk about sharpness without aliasing, smooth change from hightlights and more... when you convert this shooting in cineform and do more and more...

2) check main concept encoder for h264, they do amazing product about final codec.

You had me up until you said MC was good at h.264...NOT

i used their codec for years: dv for video, mpeg encoder for mpeg, and more...
adobe bought part of their codec to manage all exporter of adobe family..

to be honest i never encoded h264 with mainconcept encoder, but other product are good, why not about this?

You had me up until you said MC was good at h.264...NOT

...what experiences have you had that lead you to that conclusion?

What led me to that conclusion?
1) Reading about 200 posts on the Sony forum with testers rendering in every version of H.264 there is.
2 My own test of rendering from vegas thru MC into h264 as opposed to render to Avid HDDNX then into Handbreak for h264.
But we're getting away from CF here.

Main Concept is also used in Adobe's encoder... I haven't seen any problems there for a couple versions now.

It doesn't sound like you've used it in Adobe.

If I have a concern about a product due to "about 200" other people's opinions, I usually present it as such...

In your case it sounds like Vegas is the sole environment you have first hand knowledge of...so for those of us using Adobe, it may or may not apply.