I'm being lazy and should test this for myself but am hoping someone here has done this already and can confirm or deny.

The situation is that I am gearing up for multicam shoots this fall and would like to graduate to the 7 and 800 series for such.
We own a 330 and 350, renting other 350s and ingest to Avid with our U-1. We've got enough $ to purchase outright a 335 for interviews and for use as a deck... so what I'm hoping is... if we shoot with 800s in 4:2:2 1920x1080 at 50mb, I can use the 335 as a deck via firewire because Sony will have allowed the 50mb files to simply be treated as files even though the 335 limits to 35mb record?

If anyone has done this and can help, thanks in advance.

Dutch,
I doubt that the 335 will playback a format that it can't record but could be wrong. I also heard that some of the decks which should be able to playback the 800 footage might need a firmware upgrade before it works perfectly as well. I would check with Sony directly if i were you

Thanks Daniel.

I'm certain you're right that the 50mb files will not play back within the 335.

What I'm hoping is that when I connect to Avid via firewire which turns the 'pc remote' on, the clipbrowser software will see these larger files and I can drag and drop them into Avid bins.

Doubtful, but it's worth a try.

The FAM mode is a two-way process and on all XDCAM cameras and deck, you can only export via FAM file formats that are supported in record mode. That has to do with the hardware encoders/decoders built into each of those cameras and decks. Why not invest in a PDW-U1 USB drive? This is a fairly inexpensive device compare to any of the decks or cameras and that drive will read/write any favor of XDCAM. There are no hardware encoders/decoders on the PDW-U1, it's all done in software.

Thierry.

The 335 deck will not give you access to files captured on the 700/800 - even through FAM. I agree with Thierry, use the U1. It handles all types of XDCAM material with no problems and is fairly inexpensive.