Biscuits
John, do you get a black frame flash when you stop/start the video?  Just trying to see if this is something specific to my system - thanks!

Yes there is a very quick black flicker almost instant. I don't see it as a problem. 
 
I also did a quick export and the movie played fine in a media player. No blockyness. 

Biscuits
Well video seems to be importing/playing back fine for me in x3d, so I wonder if maybe it is a codec conflict for you Mark?
One issue I'm noticing though is that there is a black frame flash in the video window every time playback is started or stopped... is there any way to change this behavior? 
This will be really distracting and annoying when working on sound design where playback needs to be stopped and started quickly and frequently.

Yeah that's caused by a behavior in MF when stopping and starting video. I agree its annoying. We'll report it to Microsoft and see what we can do to alleviate the issue. The default bitrate is arbitrary and will need to be adjusted for high res videos. We'll try and make the defaults better for the next update. Our priority for this update was to get the basics of MF functional, which was a huge task in itself. 

OK, I work in Sonar/Picture everyday like markyzno and I can confirm some of what he says.  My old video files will not load or playback.  Clients usually send me Quicktime files,  I drop 'em into Vegas, cut them down to 10-15 min sections, spit out an MPEG 1 and get to work.  Now in X3d the video my client sent me will playback (a QT file that never before would work in Sonar).
 
The video playback engine does look and feel better, but it does not playback everything it use to.  For me this is a quickfix.  I have saved all the old Vegas files, so I just need to re-render picture files under a new format. I'll have to experiment with different formats to see what works best.      

Can you please make some samples of the files that won't load available? Do those same files playback in Media player?
Also please test switching back to the DShow engine using the link I posted above. If the file uses custom codecs that aren't available to MF it won't load using the new engine and will require switching to DShow. Codecs are exactly like plugins - if the video used a codec in Directshow that isn't available to MF it will not load. 
In a future update we may try and make the switching more seamless. BTW the new engine is not a quickfix. Its a full rewrite of the video engine using a completely different technology from Directshow. Some teething problems are inevitable but it has significant benefits for the more modern formats that were not supported in DShow.

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
Yeah that's caused by a behavior in MF when stopping and starting video. I agree its annoying. We'll report it to Microsoft and see what we can do to alleviate the issue. The default bitrate is arbitrary and will need to be adjusted for high res videos. We'll try and make the defaults better for the next update. Our priority for this update was to get the basics of MF functional, which was a huge task in itself. 

 
Cool, thanks Noel!  Glad to know it's being worked at, I figured it must be something to do with the new MF engine...

dubdisciple
StepD I ran into that problem too.  SO far for me, the solution was to manually enter in a higher bitrate.  Oddly, I could not confrim whether botrate was accepted because when I hit the encode option button again it went back to default settings.  However, if I entered a higher bitrate ( I used 15000000) it exported a file that was not blotchy

Okay thanks, I didn't crank the rate up that high. Probably have to find a sweet spot so the file size isn't too big (especially for youtube). It will definitely be nice not to have to mess around with third-party stuff. I was actually hoping they would add some timeline workflow features too, but I figured I was probably dreaming too big.

Gawd - I try to avoid QuickTime like the plague. It's a worse design than anything Microsoft ever put out.

Haven't installed D yet but will when I get back to the studio. I've done over a thousand videos so I have plenty of source material to try.
 
I'll likely continue to use Vegas for video, but I do find Sonar very convenient for doing soundtracks while referencing picture...especially with Acidized files to line up with hit points.

I pulled a mov file into Sonar and exported it. With default settings it shrunk in size considerably and looked as good as I would have hoped for a video that compressed.
 
At higher settings it's as good as the original.
 
Noel: Thanks for the calculator. That's going to be a big help!!
 
And does anyone have a link for where you can buy the

Noel You will need to buy a 3'rd party Media foundation compatible codec to do that.

?

SuperG
Gawd - I try to avoid QuickTime like the plague. It's a worse design than anything Microsoft ever put out.

One of the nice things about the mf engine is that qt support is baked in. I.e the is no need to install QuickTime anymore to load QuickTime videos, as was the case in the past. This gets rid of the 32 bit limitation that we had no control over.