The XH A1 and Premier Pro 2.0
 

I am about to order the XH A1 and have only been able to find tiny bits of information regarding Premier Pro's ability to handle the different 24F, 30f and 60i HDV footage.

I am not getting rid of my XL2, but am a little nervous about spending $4K and then pulling my hair out if my NLE has grief with the footage. Any reassurance/explanation of how Adobe's NLE will handle the footage would be much appreicated. Thanks!

Either native HDV or Cineform, PPro works as expected with the XL H1 with the exception of export to tape in 24F (Cineform have been working on a license to do that for some time, but it hasn't been released yet).

There are a few designed-in limitations in the capture window, like having to use your device (camera) to view the actual capture and you can't frame advance or frame reverse in the capture window (the buttons are greyed out). The one thing you will want is a fairly fast computer; doing HDV involves a lot more number crunching than DV. An older system will leave you frustrated, especially if you use AE.

If you are a premiere pro guy such as my self, one way to deal with the export to tape situation is to export the final edited file and than play it back from another software that allows export to tape. It sucks but so far it would be the only way. I hope adobe comes up with a solution for this. I export ALL my projects to tape, dvd, and vcd (for different purposes).

It sucks that premiere wont export to tape, but I was trying to think when I last exported a project to tape and its been a few years. I guess if "tape in/tape out" environments still exist, but since DVDs and or the ability to play directly from a digital file it seems like the situations where you would play from tape are pretty rare. Obviously its the cheapest way to backup a project, but I would trust a data dvd backup more than a tape backup at this point.

So as I move forward and have camera in hand in around two weeks, do I just hook up the new A1 via firewire and import using the update download from Adobe?

Yup, with the caveats noted about the capture window, it is otherwise the same process as capturing miniDV. PPro places a *.mpg (or *.mpeg -- can't remember) file extension on the captured file.

I haven't done F-mode export to tape myself as yet (maybe I should test this), but it is supposed to only be 24F that won't export to tape. 30F and 60i are supposed to be ok.

Really interesting article on the HDV format
 

Highly recommend: http://www.dv.com/features/features_...questid=401852