Buying dilemma
 

I will be purchasing the EX1 and the MacPro very soon. Here is my situation. Apple Final Cut Studio 3 is coming out at any time now. This will be the first time I buy a Mac. IF I buy the EX1 before May 31st I can receive a Sony ecoupon worth $500. If I do that at this time, I will probably miss out on Studio 3 (an upgrade is expensive). Also, If I hold off on buying the Mac now, and just buy the EX1, I will not have a way to test it on my current PC to make sure there are no problems. I will purchase from B&H and they have a 15 day return policy if something is wrong. I have read in this forum that Imovie, which comes standard with MacPro, can import with Sony's file Transfer and make it possible to edit footage from the EX1. Thus, is my best option to buy the EX1 and MacPro now, use the IMovie to test, and then wait for Studio 3 to come out? Or is there another option I'm missing? Thanks for any help.

Buy your ex1, buy your mac pro, try out your ex1 files at the Apple store in Cincinnati. If you don't need a pro nle for a while. then use whatever; if you do, buy fcs2 and then wait a while to upgrade. At worst, it will be a wash with your $500 ex1 discount.

But you're going to know if there's something wrong with your ex1 files when you go to Media in the camera and see if they play. Or on Clip Browser when you dump them to the mac. Don't think you'd need to put them on a timeline in fcp to know if there's corruption. But for peace of mind, I'm sure they'll let you play at the Apple store, esp. if you've just bought a mac pro.

Don't quote me on this, but you seem to be wanting everything now because of that EX1 $500 coupon. As far as I remember for some of the cameras I've bought, manufacturers just re-offer the deal for the next 6 month period. That is, there's a good chance of that $500 coupon existing for the next May 31 – December 31 period as a new iteration.

Check up on what Sony has done in the past concerning these cash back opportunities. You may be better off just waiting untill you actually need it as computers improve, software evolves, camera media gets cheaper and prices come down.

I can buy EX1 now and you can test it on your PC.
1. use the usb port on EX1 to connect to your PC and play the clips
2. IF you plan to use MxR with SDHC or even SxS memory, use the adapter to connect to your PC and using Sony clip browser to check out the clips or even copy it to your hard drive on the PC.

Hmmm. I just bought a new EX3, but they are on back-order. I wonder if I'll lose the E-Coupon if it ships later than May 31, AND, I wonder if the coupon is good for upgrading Vegas Pro 8 to Vegas Pro 9.

Final Cut Studio 3.0 will not be available until Apple releases Snow Leopard 10.6 which will most likely be in late August or September. Snow Leopard offers significant technology boosts that will directly benefit FCS especially for HD video projects. In fact Quicktime has been completely overhauled for Snow Leopard and this is core technology common to all of the FCS applications.

So that pushes your timeline out into the late summer or early fall. Buy the MacPro, you won't go wrong especially if FCS is your chosen editing suite. Also remember that the MacPro will run BootCamp, Parallels and VMware, if you should need a Windows environment. Cheers!

I'm sure Sony will base it on the date on the invoice.
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So what are these new expected features?