Sony HXR-NX5U & Premier CS4 on PC

[Mike Velte]

The video format of this camera is AVCHD and has been around for several years in consumer cameras. CS4 supports this format, although editing it requires a lot of horse power and RAM to edit…3.0 Quad core with 6+ GIGS of ram on Vista or W7 64 bit OS.
What I find interesting is a 3 chip AVCHD $4k camera. I would hesitate to buy such a camera and consider the HDV Pro cameras in this price range or the XDCAM cameras for a bit more.
I am interested in what others think about this.

[Brian Louis]

The cam is not too bad, its the avchd thats the problem, it can choke a i7, win7 64, and enough ram, to edit in Ppro it runs ok with Neoscene, and also Neoscene in Edius 5.12, Edius also has its own intermediate coded “HQ” which will run it when converted, but HQ is proprietary for GrassValley, the only thing that runs it ok natively is Grass Valley’s low end NLE EdiusNeo with “boost”, a software add-on, soon to be added to Edius with the coming v5.5 upgrade, Adobe should do something similar with the pending CS5??? hopefully, the intermediate codecs(10bit, 4:2:2) even though they can run it have drawbacks with file sizes, can run 30gigs/hr or more depending on quality settings, raid needed if multilayered.

[Philip Robertson]

I got an nx5e to work alongside my sony Z1 using premiere cs4..At moment i downscale to standard definition from Z1 & i set the nx5e to film sd as my pc is not good enough for 1920HD…it struggles along with 1440 x 1080.No blu-ray burner anyhow.
On comparison the nx5e auto white balance is far more orange than the Z1 & therefore could not use them together in this auto setting.
I feel the Z1 picture is sharper….would this be the 3 ccd’s superiority against the 3 CMOS chips?
The nx5e xlr microphone is far better than the z1 xlr microphone.
I enjoy the workflow, far quicker dragging mpeg files onto pc than sitting through tapes in realtime..On import you are left with mpeg files named with a list of meaningless numbers, time spent renaming clips would be needed for organisation.
In premiere i get a mismatch of upper & lower field first..DV lower field..nx5e standard def mpeg being upper field & this is another major problem for me..reverse field order of either of them..as i’ve been told to do, results in unacceptable jerkiness on movement.
editing in 1440 x 1080 using high def mpeg from both cameras then gives me a problem in adobe encore.
Adobe encore does not allow me to choose upper field in the project settings even when sending direct from premiere, so a continued mismatch.