I was going to say, Vegas 7 Demo ran in Bootcamp pretty damn speedy for me when I tried it.

A lot of PC users haven't grasped the power of the new Macs, it's a system that can run pretty much ANY software!

Yes, Vegas 7 would need to render out a file for mastering back to XDCAM disc. But this is the same for any NLE. This would only need to be done at the end of a project. And no, it isn't a lengthy process. Vegas 7 renders very quickly depending on your hardware.

No. Vegas will play everything in realtime. How smooth the playback is though will depend on your hardware. So, for simple projects you could play straight out through the Decklink since it can be used for monitoring on an external monitor. But if you have a lot of layers then yes, you will need to render. It all depends on your project.

I know what you mean Steve, but Bootcamp is buggy as hell right now and we are talking Windows after all.

I'm not advocating using Windows and Vegas at all, I'm not a big fan of either of them, but if you want to use Vegas as well as FCP on the same machine you can. Although I'll bow to other peoples experience on how Bootcamp is at the moment.

Bootcamp may be buggy right now, however, give Parallels Desktop for Mac a try for running Windows XP and Windows applications on Intel Mac. They offer a 15-day trial activation key so you can take it for a spin and decide for yourself if it's as good as they say it is. The performance is excellent. Now you can have the best of both worlds... Vegas and Final Cut :-) on the same Intel Mac and swing both ways, Mac and PC.

a Mac-guy-friend-of-mine tried Parallel's, he said it's not very feasible, because you'll need a lot of ram, since Parallel's itself took out much ram. So if your mac book has only 1 GB, you can forget about any windows editing apps.
* that's what he said... correct me if it's wrong...

It is true that Parallels eats ram, but that's to be expected as you are running two operating systems at the same time. However it's a lot cheaper to stick an extra gig of ram in a macbook (or powermac) than it is to buy a PC for Vegas. One really nice feature is the ability to use the batch processing capabilities of Vegas, storing the files in the Parallels shared folder and then open them in FCP for editing without having to re-boot or swap drives or send stuff over a network. You do really need at least 2gig of Ram to run Vegas and FCP at the same time.

Alister, the workflow you mentioned regarding Vegas and FCP is what I'm looking for. Would you care to comment and elaborate more on that? I'll try parallells today. Thanks.

although mentioned earlier. and even tho I'm not a fan per se ... let me throw in another mention of Canopus Edius 4.1. recently added XDCAM import and export options with full proxy editing support.