I needed to remove "[/link" from url - I think it was a typo.

Spot? No need for an intermeadiarary? Bob and Serena seem to think you need NEO HD. Gearshift support?

Mike

edit to add question

Neo HD? Hm, I don't have it and don't have any probs. Just use Sony Clip Browser and export as mxf.

- Ray
www.undergroundplanet.com

"Spot? No need for an intermeadiarary? Bob and Serena seem to think you need NEO HD. Gearshift support?"

Not Spot but no, no need for Neo HD. I can drop HQ straight into V8.
If you've been editing HDV using CF and want to use HQ then you need the more expensive version of Neo to handle that res.

No real need for Gearhsift either.

Both comments above assume you've got a pretty beefy PC if you want full res RT playback. CF may bring some advantages to the table too. Also keep in mind HQ will eat up more storage.

XDCAM brings many things to the table. The EX1 does away with automatic archival storage. You need to work through several interacting issues and find a fit that suits your business and clients, there's simply no one solution that'll suits everyone. In some environments I can see Gearshift or a derivative thereof becoming a must have tool for some of us. The EX1 also dispenses with the XDCAM proxies, a tool to restore that functionality could find a market.

Bob.

Why does HDV have/need a proxy and XDCAM not? Is the GOP or compression or something make it easier to edit than HDV? I'm sorry if I took Bobs name in vein but I know Serena said I would need to upgrade NEO to HD, not just to keep using NEO but would need to edit the .mfx files but seems this is not so. By Monday nigh I should know for myself!

It's all system dependent. A fast computer can manage the .mxf files due to the significantly improved decoder found in Vegas Pro 8. Old computers may well need Neo, GearShift, or other intermediary.
My MacBook running Vegas Pro...I can run 3 streams of EX footage...

There's uses for proxies beyond the issue of computer speed, you can use proxies for anything, film, HDV, even DV. I stress the point you CAN, not must!
Proxies are small, and easy to move around.
You might have huge amounts of footage. Keeping all that online can get expensive, moving the full res material offline (data DVDs in draws) or nearline (NAS boxes on your network) and keeping the proxies local or even moving them nearline can make economic sense.
You can easily give proxies to a client with no fear of them walking off elsewhere. The client can do a quick rough cut and send it back to you, you conform the full res material and edit away.

Again MH, I stress you don't have to do this, it's just another tool you could use. Depending on what you do you may never have any use for it or it might become the core of your work.

Hope you enjoy your camera when it arrives. Don't sweat over all the things in the menu. Out of the box it's pretty awesome, spend some time enjoying yourself. I found just the quality of the image in the LCD very seductive.

Bob.

There's a problem with that method.
If you manage to capture a clip that is split across two cards it will not be joined correctly.
Windows mounts the two card as separate drives. The clip browser can only access one at a time. So when you transfer card A and convert to MXF the clip browser complains that it cannot find part of a clip. The same thing happens when you go to transfer the contents of card B. Joining them on the Vegas T/L gives you a few missing frames at the join.

It's seems the only solution is to copy all the files from card A and card B into the one HDD folder and then do the MXF conversion with the clip browser from there. Which is a bit of a PIA because you need double the disk space.

Bob.

Thanks all for the replies.

What I have finally determined was that the version of the Clib Browser that shipped with the EX1 was old (thank goodness!). When using the Clip Browser that shipped with the EX1, it said that I could only convert 1440x1080 60i and 50i files to MXF (no other resolutions were supported in that version).

Oddly, going to the website listed in the user guide for the SxS memory did not bring up any support area at all where updates would be posted.

After extensive Googling, I stumbled on to an EU site that had an updated version of the Clip Browser software that would convert other resolutions to MXF files.

Why Sony wouldn't make this software available on their US site is beyond me.

For others that might encounter this problem, here's the link:

http://www.sonybiz.net/biz/view/ShowContent.action?site=biz_en_EU&contentId=1193315622075