HD AMV Questionaire

[Midnyte]

I edit both direct .m2ts(mainly 1080p), and bait(360p) & switch(480p,720p,1080p). I never use the LAG. Think about it, even the ripped source is not 'lossless'. And you don't have the Master. The only purpose of lag would be making every frame a keyframe.. you can do this with h264 aswell, but at a much smaller bit footprint. The only advantage I can come up with for LAG is that it takes far less cpu to edit with then h264.
When considering source transcodes one should also consider things like "does my raid controller have cache" the more you keep inside that cache the smoother things will stay. Of course if you have source size + 2gb of ram W7 x64 does a good job caching also. There are definatly some system requirments if one wants to edit in h264 @ 1080p and keep some assemblance of sanity: high end i7, preferabley a 980X; bare min 8GB ram; software that takes advantage of both.
I can render 1080p in near realtime, so no real problem there. CS5, 980X, quad-sli make a high performance render partnership.
I will normally download the highest quality version of an AMV (after preview to determine if i would even download it).
The local con here accepts HD, though they make no promise of it displaying at that.