New toy in the house!!
 

Well, after considering a JVC 700 quite seriously for some time, and poor service from JVC UK, ( see here http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/jvc-gy-hm...ricing-uk.html ) yesterday I picked up a Sony EX3 from Prestons. They were really great, and seem genuinely interested in their customers. I also bought a Manfrotto remote. Now I cant wait to get out there and start playing.

I think I will get a Nikon adapter pretty soon, but first I need a new pc to edit my stuff. Coices between Premiere CS4 and Edius, any thoughts folks.

I fired the cam up last night briefly and was well impressed with the viewfinder and lcd screen, a big change from what I'm used to. The biggest change will be the switch to tapeless, and I'm still a bit nervous about this though, but hey, its the way forward right??
I have 2 16gb sxs cards and the Sony reader, and will also stock up with the Kensington and sdhc combo.

I'll report back once I have used it properly, but in the meantime, I can see me asking lots of questions, so be prepared LOL.

Stuart

Hi Stuart, you'll love the tapeless workflow.
For back up purposes i use a program called allway sync, it mirrors folders, files or even whole hard dives, i've got mine set up so that my 2 500gb external drives get mirrored to a seperate 1tb drive.
So. my workflow is, come home from shoot, offload cards to one of my 500gb hard drives, and that's it, 1 hour later allway sync will automatically copy those files to the 1tb drive.

I have a WD 500gb drive and a seagate 500gb drive, inside the 1tb drive i have 2 folders called WD500 and seagate 500, inside these folders i have all the contents of the 2 500gb drives.
I also have another hard drive which sits on the shelf not connected to the pc, once a month i also copy the most precious files to that as well, the wedding files mostly.

Paul.

Congrats on the new cam!
As a long time EDIUS user of course I am biased, but I can explain the benefits:
1) Real RT full raster out through HDMI (consider getting HDSpark w/Edius 5) (no "preview")
2) NO transcoding. Just plop the clips from the SXS card right into Edius and edit off the card!
3) Very fast, quality effects.
4) Great customer support (Edius 5.10 was just released last night in fact!)
5) Bin/clip organization is very good.


Did I mention real RT out? heh

Ditto here (about Edius). Have been able to run op to 4 streams of native XDCAM-EX files (Picture in Picture) without need for rendering on a dual Xeon, Dual Core, Woodcrest 5160.

I'm on a Mac so I use FCP and can't recommend a solid PC program, although there's several out there.

What I can say though is the tapeless workflow is a leap of faith coming from tape I agree. I got my EX1 last summer and was weary and nervous about the SxS card set up. Not anymore. I've had zero problems (always back up files though) and would NEVER go back to the tape capture set up. It cuts your capture time down to nothing, love it.

Good luck.

Good decision on the new EX3, Stuart. I also seriously considered the HM 700: affordable media, shoulder rest, immediate Final Cut access etc. were tempting, but the lack of timelapse was a real deal-breaker for me. I can't understand why JVC would leave out such a key element for many shooters -- and don't hold your breath in the hope of a firmware update.

I suspect an EX3 is in my near future also. In which case, expect lots of questions from me too! And I need to work out a reliable workflow/backup system for the Mac along the lines for PC suggested by Paul. Ideas, anyone?

I can cofirm the points already made about Edius. Running both FCP and Edius on the same MacPro, Edius is much better in real time performance and rendering, also it is very stable - yes I have had crashes with FCP! Download a month long trial copy.

Good luck,

Geoff