My apologies for not getting an announcerment out. I need to clone myself, to better spread the workload. If you've noticed, all of the post production boards are now under a single category.

Sent to Sony, I'll update with thier answer.

Heck usually I can barely make words out in between sips of morning coffee. But again, thanks for all the hard work admins.

Ditto Steven's remarks. You all do an outstanding job with these forums. And great to see a new compositing board as well!

Vegas 6 and HD - does it come native?
 

I am thinking about upgrading to Vegas 6. Does it come with everything needed to edit from an HD camera out of the box? Do I need special software that is extra (or hardware). Right now I have a Firewire for DV.

Well, I have Vegas Movie Studio 6 Platinum, and it can do HD, so it follows that the full version should as well.

Which DV Codec to use
 

I have instaled "DV CODEC SWITCHER" and with this tool I can choose which codec to use during DV capturing or editing in Vegas (one of codecs that I have instaled on my computer, Canopus, Cedocida, Panasonic ...).
So my question is, which DV codec gives high quality for capturing and editing.
On of them or some other?
Regards.

That is good. No plugin required. Did you use straight firewire?

Technically, a codec is not used during capture. The data is simply copied from the tape to the hard drive. The codec is used for decoding the video to display on the screen and reencoding when changes are made.

For Vegas, I'd stick with the Sony DV codec included with Vegas.

You'll be good to go straight out of the box. Vegas 6 can capture HDV direct from firewire using the internal capture program.

What size of drive are we talking about for 15-20 minutes - and how can I output this keeping HD (to DVD?)?

HD (m2t) files are about the same size as DV (DV-AVI) files - roughly 13Gig/hour. If you then convert them to Cineform, they will be larger. Besides, you can never have too much disk space.

Vegas 6.0d, Cineform, and JVC HD-100
 

Edit: Please delete this message

As Edward mentioned, 1080i HDV is 25Mbps, same as DV. Converted to CineForm Medium setting, plan on around 40GBph.

Update
 

The problem was vegas was crashing specifically on a render of a build made up of 6 sub builds.

The first thing I did to try and diagnose this was to render each veg file individually that makes up my final veg build. I figured and still do believe that the crashing has something to do with a single part such as a audio or video file. But renderign each part was successful, so the next thing I did was recreate the veg file with all the veg parts/builds. I did not add the music. I rendered this no problem. Because I had tried to render my 'Love Build' and it crashed three times, I then decided to render it using my older machine. This would be a render from files on my NLE to an older machine over a network. Well it took about 3 times as long but it rendered nontheless.

So in short, I could render the parts of my build individually and collectively (minus the music and one picture), and I could render the same total build on my older machine across my network even, but I can't render the same build on my NLE from my NLE.

My conclusion so far is that one of the files used in my total build is not being read by my page file on my NLE. When I get some time, I'll probably rebuild that total build and see if it renders, for now though there's more work to be done.

It beats all I've ever seen, hehe, I hope this diatribe helps someone in the future.