Planning a shoot with Sony PMW-EX1

kunal wrote on 8/25/2009, 6:30 PM
Hi,

I'm considering shooting a short film with a friend's EX1. I currently have Vegas 4.0.

What Vegas version would I need to upgrade to in order to be able to capture & edit the XDCAM footage from EX1?

Also, I don't have a free PCI express slot on my desktop. Are there other ways to import clips from the EX1?

Thanks for your patience with a basic question.
Kunal

Comments

PeterWright wrote on 8/25/2009, 6:42 PM
V9 is the first to be able to import "native" clips from EX1. With V8 you have to first rewrap as MXF using Sony Clip Browser - a simple enough task.

You can connect the EX1 to PC using USB for transfer purposes.
craftech wrote on 8/25/2009, 7:18 PM
If your end result is to be SD DVD, you could use the Sony Clip Browser to convert the footage from the EX1 to DV and then edit in Vegas 4.0.

John
mikelinton wrote on 8/26/2009, 9:07 AM
There are a few ways you can do this... the easiest and cheapest way to get the footage off the EX1 is to hook it up via the USB port, and it will act as a 2 slot card reader. Use the ClipBrowser software to transfer the footage to your system (and then back it up). You can then use the Clipbrowser software to convert the footage to MXF, which (I think?) you can work with in Vegas 4 (can't remember how much MXF support Vegas 4 has to be honest).

You can also convert to DV.AVI in the ClipBrowser software too, and edit natively in standard def... although there is some discussion as to the conversion quality of the footage - I haven't spent a lot of time looking at it, we don't do much in standard def anymore.

As for the PCIe slot - there are some ExpressCard readers around that will work with the EX1 cards, but many of them are not hotswappable so require you to go into the devince manager and remove the device, and scan for new hardware to detect a new card. Not a deal breaker, but something to keep in mind... transfering with an ExpressCard reader in a PCIe slot will be the fastest way to transfer.

As an alternative (and what we do), is use the ExpressCard slot on a laptop to dump the cards. Just connect the gigabit ethernet to the edit suite, and dump the cards to the RAID... probably the fastest way to transfer without having a PCIe, ExpresCard card.

Mike.