Here is what Mike Jones said on this matter, " It depends on which order you want to work. most of the time you'll want to build 'fx shots' and special sequences in After Effects/Combustion/Fusion etc and then export them to bring into the main editing timeline (vegas etc)
Thats much more common, and tends to make more sense, than exporting sequences from the editing system to the compositing and back again. Unless you need to do a lot of editing on those clips before they are ready for Compositing, in which case a quick pre-edit in vegas and then out to the Compositor.
In either case the process is simple - its about understanding lossy and lossless compression formats. What you don't want to do is throw away data on the way out of one software into another; you want to keep it lossless.
Broadly speaking this means using a CODEC that is either Totally Lossless or Visually Lossless. Totally Lossless generally means Uncompressed but the big drawback with this is the files are absolutely massive and you get virtually no real-time performance unless you're running a super-computer. So the better option most often is a Visually Lossless codec - this means that whilst there is technically a small amount of compression going on this compression is considered undetectable to the human eye.
There are a few very common Lossless video formats used for moving a project between one software and another. Some are free, some are extras.. We've been talking about Cineform in this thread and its is a superb visually lossless codec. But the 3 other common ones to try which are freely available are:
- Quicktime 'Component Video' - 422 YUV codec. generic part of Quciktime. This is a great universal codec that can be used by any software system that can access quciktime (which is everyone).
- Blackmagic - 8bit and 10bit 422 and 444 codecs available for free from,
http://www.blackmagic-design.com/support/software/
These codecs are superb quality and can be used by anyone so long as they download and install them. They're free so thats easy and they use MOV or AVI wrappers. But they do make HUGE files and are somewhat inefficient.
- Sony YUV - 422 codec. 8bit and 10bit. Installed with Vegas. This is a codec unique to Vegas but which uses a generic AVI wrapper and can be used in any software that has access to the codec. So if you're working on the same machine where you have Vegas installed you're good to go.
All four - QT Component Vid, Cineform, BlackMagic and SonyYUV - are perfect for moving projects between systems without generation loss. Cineform and Sony YUV will give the best performance in Vegas; The other two are more universal."
I am trying to try these and still working on it. Any ideas or help on codec and which ones to use when handling footage from canon xh a1 using Sony Vegas Pro 8 would be appreciated.