Just feeling the need to rave a little about this camera. Over the past week, several features unique to this camera have truly been a blessing. First lets start with being able to dual record to SDHC and the FMU128 Flash unit at the same time. Really saved me on Thursday. Client wanted 4x3 SD but the client of the client wanted the footage in HD for future promotional stuff. Without the dual record option, it would have cost me hours downconverting HD to SD before sending to the client. Same situation at tonights shoot. Client wants 16x9 SD on DVD's. I like to archive all my raw in HD just in case they come back later wanting it in HD, which has happened lately. Dual record makes that easy. Use the SD footage on the SDHC cards for editing and just dump off the HD footage from the FMU128 to a hard drive as archive. Very simple process.

No firewire, no problem. My client that wants 4x3 SD also wants it on MiniDV. This is where firewire would be nice. I'd just connect NX5U to a cheap MiniDV via firewire and play out of one to dub to the other. Unfortunately Sony figured if you were tapeless you'd have no need for firewire. My how wrong they were. Fortunately, I own a Grass Valley AVC55 analog to DV converter. I just connect the NX5U composite out to the converter and firewire from the converter to a cheap Canon ZR960. Play out of the NX5U and dub to the Canon. Everything works and looks great.

Hey Sony, how about adding firewire to your next version of the NX5U?

I think Firewire has well and truly had its day Michael, and what a horrible little 4 pin connector it was, too. Many a PCB has been fried by the power and signal pins being too close and too easily misinterpreted.

Just to come back to your dual recording thoughts. The big problem the 128 flash memory faces is the downwards spiralling costs of SDHC cards. 32 gb cards are eye-brow-raising cheap these days, making the 128 box look very dear. But as you say, it's a neat trick to be able to record different formats to each storage port.

But when you say, 'it would have cost me hours downconverting HD to SD' this suggests that you do a TMPG or Vdub downconvert to get the best SD. The NX5 does indeed record MPEG SD footage, but the downconversion from the 1920 x 180 chips is done in real time and I'd suggest that this is not the best quality route. Or have you found otherwise?

tom.

I'm talking about loading HD clips I'm my NLE and rendering out SD clips. Best export settings I've found are to QuickTime using a DVCPro codec. One minute of footage tales 3 minutes to convert. Best quality but takes forever to convert.

It could be exceptionally fast to convert down to SD with a Matrox MXO2, and encoded to h264 at high speed too.

Andrew