Demo version lacking...

Question

If Adobe is serious about getting me to drop 1,000 dollars for Adobe Effects CS5 they're going to have to do better than that for the downloadable demo.
I do mainly green screen work with my AVCHD camcorder.
First thing I find out is the demo version does not support AVCHD.  So how am I supposed to know whether editing AVCHD files work well in AE?  And no, I am not going to take anybody's word for it.  I've been bitten by shoddy AVCHD support before.  I currently use Sony Vegas Pro and AVCHD support is excellent there.
So, fine... I convert some of my green screen clips to png image sequences and import that into AE.
Then I find out that keylight is not even in the demo download.  Oh come, on!  Just how am I supposed to know if this is going to work for me or not?  $1,000 is a lot of money... and what can I test in the demo... nothing.  Nice going.
I refuse to pay that amount of money unless I know _for sure_ that this product is going to work perfectly for me on my box.
Marv

Answer 1

Rick: "Giving you more room between the original pixel values to make adjustments" - that is what applying 16 or 32 bit effects do, and you reduce color banding that way.  Transcoding original source footage from 8 into 10 bits doesn't do that - you're just spreading 8 bits over 10 and very slightly altering the original color values (no you can not remap 8 bit channels exactly into 10... if you want to know why, ask me).
By simply decompressing AVCHD footage you are in effect transcoding it from 422 or 444 or whatever YCbCr color space the footage was in, into 8 or 16 or 32 bit RGB color space, on the fly.  AE already does this.  No extra cost.  I am just merely asking for Adobe to fix a bug with their existing AVCHD decompressor that they've already created.
One possible valid reason I can think of to transcode AVCHD clips into a format that doesn't use inter-frames, is if you were splicing them and re-rendering back out into AVCHD.  Because keyframes are present in the AVCHD stream only once up to every 300 frames, if you splice somewhere in between keyframes then you are in effect forcing a re-compression of that GOP (group of pictures), creating a new keyframe where you spliced the footage and re-creating up to 299 inter-frames from the splice point to the next keyframe.  This re-compression degrades the video, obviously.  Now there are ways around that without having to do a costly and disk-heavy transcode into a space hungry codec.  Let's say that you have a long footage you want to splice away unneeded parts to save disk space.  Don't splice exactly where you intend to show the video... splice away at a point at least 300 frames before and 300 frames after the usable segment.  Then when you re-compress to AVCHD the segment you intend to use is untouched.  If you're using a decent editor, the unedited GOPs should be copied unmodified from the original source to the new AVCHD clip.
Another reason to transcode is if your computer isn't up to decompressing AVCHD clips in real time.  AVCHD codecs are very processor intensive, and most consumer grade computers will chug with AVCHD media.  However I have a pretty beefy computer, and can scrub 1080p AVCHD clips at full frame rate.
My background: I am a video game programmer, and deal a lot with codecs.  I've written a few codecs myself over the years.  I write plugins for various video editing software on the side (Mostly Vegas Pro) doing stuff like motion tracking and optical flow and so on.  Currently I am working on something that is similar to Particular.
I guess my point with this rambling is that is that my currently workflow is very nice, has low overhead, and does exactly what I need.  I don't currently need to waste a lot of time and disk space transcoding into a format that really buys me nothing.  All I need is a working AVCHD codec that doesn't mess up the decompression.  You're obviously happy with your workflow, and so more power to you.  But it's really not for me.
Marv