The company I work for wants to use the Ex-1 and take the footage straight to a Mac desktop using Adobe Premiere Pro CS3.

I've plugged the USB cable from the camera to the Mac, it recognizes the drives on the camera, I can transfer the clips to the Mac and of course when you put them in Premiere, there is video, but no audio.
I expected that much.

If I install the Sony Clip Browser software for Mac, will it wrap the Ex1 files so Premiere will be happy with them? I've been led to believe it's not that easy.

I know at least with Final Cut Pro there is a Sony plug in that makes everything work.

Will an expensive third party solution like Cineform have to be used?

The company has a copy of FCP, but having to import into FCP, then export to PrPro isn't a smooth workflow.

Adobe is far behind. This is coming from a ex-Adobe Fanboy. I still use the software. but have bought MainConcept's plug-in. Which works great if your projects are less than 9min long and you have less than 7gig of refrence video. (currently in the middle of a long talk with them about this)

So if you are strictly filming :30 spots... its fantastic.

My temp solution is this (by no means should this need to be done). Start a project, edit sections 1, 2, 3, 4, (maybe 2min each).... render out the sectoins... then do 5-8, etc.... then im going to start a master edit and pull in all the rendered chunks. Normally these would just be other sequences... I hope this works.

No idea if it's in your budget or not, but we use Matrox Axio hardware and software combined with PPro CS3, and it handles all of the EX1's files in realtime after they've been converted to the MXF file format (legacy XDCAM).

Outside of that, I would try to get in touch with Adobe and see when they plan to support the EX1's file structure.

There is always Cineform.

I use Prospect HD on a PC with PPro CS3, but it also works on Mac OS too.