Hi guys! I hope I can get some advice and encouragement!

I've just taken on a job editing a music video shot on an EX1. The most I've ever done before is DV editing and so I'm a little nervous about this new project, and its coming real soon!

Firstly, I have a rather modest setup available to me right now: Intel Core2Duo @ 2.66GHz, 2GB RAM, running Windows XP Service Pack 3. I have an old NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT graphics card. Told you it was modest!

I have Premiere Pro CS4 as well as Sony Vegas Pro 8 and am proficient in both platforms.

The trouble is that I've never worked with HD footage before and not sure that my system can sustain the load.

Also, I don't know what to do with the footage which will arrive on a hard disk. Can I simply copy it to my drive and drop it in my NLE timeline? Do I need any specific codecs? Can I edit offline?

What's the workflow like? Will I be able to preview through firewire going into my DSR-11 Deck and to a TV monitor? Will I need an I/O card?

Am I missing something?

Basically I need all the help I can get. I'm hoping that I won't need anything and the footage will easily show up on the timeline and my system will be able to handle it all perfectly, but being the pessimist that I am I'm also dreading the worst!

Help!

- Ali

You can edit XDCAM EX footage in either of those NLEs.
First make certain you get exact images if the cards, each in it's own folder.
If using Vegas 8 you'll need to use the free Clipbrowser to convert to MXF for NLE and join any clips that span cards.
In Ppro you can simply import the mp4 container objects and then drop them onto the timeline. There are Sony documents for both those NLEs that explain the workflows. The one for Ppro may only cover CS3 but I doubt much if anything changed in CS4.
Your DSR-11 cannot handle HD unless you decide to edit the footage on a 16:9 SD timeline. Playback performance might not be stellar on old hardware but it should still work. In Vegas 8 playback in Preview quality should be full fps if no FXs are applied.
You'll probably get more detailed answers in NLE specific a forum here or elsewhere. Which NLE you decide to use really depends on the features you need, both will work just fine. Having said that my experience if more Vegas than Ppro specific.

Here's some quick help I can offer. I mostly edit these days in FCP and EX footage is great in there. I've worked with it on PP4 on my PC as well and works well there too. You should be alright with that setup to edit the footage alright. Stay native with XDCAM I'd recommend unless you are running Prospect HD and it works well for you.

First though, go get an external FW800 or eSata RAID drive. Make sure its at least a 2 disc array. That should run you a couple hundred bucks. FW800 is plenty enough speed for a few streams of EX footage at once.

Get all the footage into a nicely setup project folder on that drive and go ahead and start importing. CS4 has native support now and is great to work with. You dont need to rewrap files or anything like you do on the MAC so you should be fine there.

So your computer should handle it, just not a lot of realtime effects probably, but make sure you have a little more drive speed than just an internal single or something. You'll love working with it over tape immediately. I cry whenever I get a tape project anymore!

Hope that offers some help, I'm sure others will have a lot of other input, particularly more on the PP4 and Vegas side of things than me.