Hey Dave,

The clients wanted it rough cut. then they want it as a readable file for premiere.
It was shot on Sony HDV and as far as what I've been told.
You need a Sony HDV deck to playback tapes shot on Sony. They don't.

HDV is HDV, shouldn't matter if you print to tape.

a 1 hour HDV 60i file on my computer is 11.5gb in size. Two hour should be ~23gb in size. HDV is a standard format, every windows NLE should be able to open it like a DV AVI.

Try rendering to Quicktime PNG format. Lossless video & compresses well.

Or, go to them & say "Give me a specific format". IMHO, if they want an HDV file they should have a way to accept it. IE tape, etc.

a 1 hour HDV 60i file on my computer is 11.5gb in size. Two hour should be ~23gb in size.

Is this .avi? Christ mine are way bigger than that. If it is avi. what bitrate are you using?
Seriously. I tried to do a 2 hour .avi and it tapped out at over 400 gigs.

as hf wrote - hdv IS hdv (@12gb per hour)

and, if your client asked for raw footage hdv IS raw footage.

if they can't handle hdv then obviously they have no idea what's going on!!!!

HDV is a specific format & type, like DV. There's no settings, etc. If you don't use one of the HDV templates it's not HDV any more, it's just a plain rendered file.

HDV is under the mpeg-2 file types.

L8R, HDV is a specific, highly-compressed flavour of MPEG-2, but it is the raw footage with no quality loss.

Understand that .avi or .mov are just containers. The actual video stream within the file can be encoded (compressed) with any one of a number of codecs. Sounds like you've been rendering uncompressed .avi, which is also lossless, but enormous, and your file size does not surprise me.

How did you capture your HDV (if it was with Vegas then which version), and which version of Premiere Pro won't open the files? Maybe you could try a capture with the free HDVSplit program and see if Premiere Pro will open that file.

If you still fail to get the HDV into Premiere Pro then there is a multitude of near-lossless compression formats that you could try but ideally you should try and get the HDV working first.

Taped on Sony HDR FX1 as 1440x1080 60i HDV on mini DV cassette.

captured into Vegas Pro 10 as default .m2t HDV through Sony's internal HDV capture.

Current project settings are 1440x1080 60i.

I tried opening the captured file into an older version of premiere 1.5, it said it wasn't a supported file type. I had hoped to give them just the .m2t file and call it a day.

Would one of the more current versions of Premiere open .m2t files?

The .avi template I used for rendering is windows .avi - Sony YUV codec @ 1440x1080i. - default settings within

I tried opening the captured file into an older version of premiere 1.5, it said it wasn't a supported file type

That would like asking Vegas 3 to open the same file.
It can't be done with such an old version.

Would one of the more current versions of Premiere open .m2t files?

Most definitely.

The .avi template I used for rendering is windows .avi - Sony YUV codec @ 1440x1080i. - default settings within.

That explains why the file size was so large.
As has already been suggested, edit it and give it to them in it's native format of m2t.

Mike