[Sonic 67]

[Graham Bernard] “Presently, I am very happy with my lowly card, and what it can do.”

Bernand, your card is not that “lowly” 🙂
It has a maximum performance of 1263.4 GFLOPS in Single Point mode (relevant number for video editing).
The OP card has only 320 GFLOPS.

For reference, an i7 4770K (at 4.6 GHz) has only about 100 GFLOPS.
An i7 2600K @ 3.4Ghz has around 44 GFLOPS.

[Sonic 67]

First of all laptops are slooow for video editing.
720m has only 96 cores, Fermi, so is not top of the line either.
Lately, check to see if you really are using the nVidia with your software (Optimus might use only the Intel video card if you don’t force it).

[Sonic 67]

You need a video card with 1GB memory (or more) that supports OpenCL 1.1 (minimum).

[Sonic 67]

On a similar T3500: I am using now a SSD as OS drive and a RAID5 array created from three identical drives to store the bulk of my files (video, photo, games). RAID5 offers a good redundancy level, but it takes an odd number of drives. For your case a RAID10 will offer a better solution (at just 2TB capacity, but double the redundancy and double the speed).
Personally I use the Intel RAID embedded on motherboard, a dedicated RAID theoretically can add some performance.

As a back-up I have an external 4TB eSATA connected drive.

A review about your RAID card:
https://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/3ware-9690sa.html

[Sonic 67]

My experience is not even close to John’s, but this is my take:

Basically Sony Vegas is still tied to it’s single user, audio editing oriented concepts.
It is fine for an one-man-band, but not so efficient for a company that requires collaboration and division of work.

DaVinci Resolve and Fusion are examples of software promoting collaboration inside a company.

You cannot really compare apples with oranges.

[Sonic 67]

[Norman Black] “Since Youtube re-encodes everything you upload”

This happens with the audio too… YT resamples everything to 44.1kHz.
Also, I am not sure if is a local streaming issue, since I cannot see artifacts in the above video.
Stats for nerds reports the format as DASH/VOD:
https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/What-Is-…/What-is-MPEG-DASH-79041.aspx

[Sonic 67]

John,

Sony decoder has CABAC, but it cannot do 2K that OP seem to want.

[Sonic 67]

Strange, I just DL the last version (I had an older one) and install it – MS Security Essentials didn’t complained.

[Sonic 67]

You should be able to import the files. But as far as I know, Windows allows you to read ProRes files via Quicktime (32 bit version only), but you cannot encode it.

To be sure that you get the format that you expect, you can use MediaInfo to inspect the files:
https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo

However, I don’t edit in 4K, so my experience might be limited (to DNxHD and Sony MXF for 1080p).
My render options for 4k video are only the ones from XAVC/XAVC-S.

[Sonic 67]

With the latest QT you should be able to playback ProRes HQ on Windows. Of course cannot edit or output in that format…
Unless you get this:
https://www.miraizon.com/products/codecsoverview.html
They say:
Q: Will the codecs work with Adobe CS and CC applications?
A: Yes, our codec components are compatible with Adobe CS and CC applications.
Q: Will the codecs work with Edius or Vegas?
A: Yes, our codec components are compatible with GrassValley Edius and Sony Vegas applications.