OT Sony HD XR550

brianw wrote on 8/7/2010, 11:04 PM
Against the advice of many on this forum I went for the 550 since my use now is for holidays and family vids (minimum editing). Am blown away by the pic quality but less impressed with some of the extras. For example the GPS which could be useful is pretty hopeless, can take ten minutes to lock on to sats. and thats outside sitting still. My main concern is the transfer of files to the computer. The bundled program "PMB" is so clunky. Is there a better program for this. Windows file transfer works OK but doesn't give any sorting as to date/time etc.
By the way I seem to have no probs with simple cuts and transition editing on a 2.4 gig quad core and V9.

Comments

ritsmer wrote on 8/8/2010, 12:28 AM
I have the SONY CX550VE with 64 GB internal memory (and before the CX505V 32 GB internal). I'm doing some 4.000 -5.000 clips a year with it and its little brother, the SONY TX7.

For transfer from camera to PC I just use the Windows Explorer - where you can add extra columns to sort with.

What I like more, however, is to record to 16 GB SD cards and then copy all clips of the day to the laptop in the evening just by plugging the SD card into the laptop.
Doing so you will not lose much work is the camera is lost or damaged.

I have not installed the PMB at all (know it from earlier cameras)

I have not used the GPS for real - but my experiments show that it is on and ready instantly also when you switch off the camera.

I record in 1920x1080 50i at 17 Mbps AVCHD on both cameras and can drop the clips directly to the Vagas 9.0e 64 bit timeline - and edit and preview them - just so.
If I use the Vegas 9.0e 32 bit (for the 32 bit plugins) it is necessary to apply the >2GB setting. It seems to be enough to do it to the vegas90.exe only.
Dreamline wrote on 8/8/2010, 12:57 AM
PMB is clunky but it has so many cool features that its a must use.

I wish Vegas would have some of these features.
Erik Olson wrote on 8/10/2010, 6:47 AM
When I got an SR-11 a few years back, I found that PMB messed with direct show codecs on my system, making h.264 unviewable in 3rd party players. And it was slower than anything to deal with.

Like the other posters, I just copy files by dragging and dropping the MTS files. I found a free program "Bulk Rename Utility" out on the net that will rename the files based on their date and time, so instead of "000315.MTS" they now become "2010-08-10 13_44_05.m2ts" Insures that all the files have unique names.

I have since bought a CX550V, so I now include a separate ID for the camera in the rename as well.