i found a comment from someone in amazon.com saying that the premiere pro 2 he used (trial version) can't recognize his HDR-FX1. here goes the comment found at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/B000E8JLDA/sr=1-69/qid=1191780898/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_helpful/002-6568408-3186442?ie=UTF8&n=229534&qid=1191780898&sr=1-69#customerReviews

"I own an HDV camcorder. I want to edit in HDV and I've used Premiere Pro 1.5 to do it, however the two-step import process (including a potentially lossy conversion) frustrated me.

Happy with the workflow and features of Premiere Pro, I tried the trial download of 2.0 first. For one thing, it refused under any circumstances to recognize my HDR-FX1 camcorder (which is on its compatibility list) in HDV mode (despite appropriate iLink conversion and HDV VCR settings). Freeware applications like CapDVHS worked fine, so I finally gave up after trying Premiere Pro 2.0 on two machines. (Nevermind the trouble I had with the trial expiring on the same day I installed it.)

After trying Adobe Premiere 2.0, Avid Liquid, and Sony Vegas 7.0 it was (surprise) the Sony software that successfully captured, edited, and rendered the HDV project I am working on.

Premiere simply shouldn't have "Native HDV Editing" as a feature until they perform at least as well as the other major players in HDV editing. "

does anybody here ever experienced the same?

i'm using Sony HVR-V1P and was thinking of going to do my NLE using premiere pro 2 especially for HDV editing. is there any better suggestion? thank you.

regards, Faiq

I got Adobe Production Studio early last year at academic price when I was taking video production classes at the local cc. In May this year I started building a dual xeon 5130 workstation. At the time my only camera was an old Canon XL1, which has always worked great with PP2.0 1394 capture using the built in port on the Tyan s2696 motherboard.

I added a Blackmagic Intensity Pro card to get a real-time monitor of source and program (timeline) while editing--it was the cheapest good-quality option, and I couldnt afford a Matrox RT.X2. And from many things I read, I became convinced that HDMI is the poor man's SDI, and for the masses will be the capture/RT monitor interface of the future.

Well, once I had that, of course, when the Canon HV20 came along, creating a tremendous buzz, I just had to get one. And so now I capture into PP2.0 usning HDMI and the codec/presets supplied by Blackmagic. I get AVI files with very little compression, much better than HDV using firewire (a 28 minute video captured with HDMI and motion-JPEG compressor yielded a 20GB AVI file). I have even captured 'live' from the camera in 8-bit YUV uncompressed for 4:10 (250 seconds); this produced a file 30GB! The Intensity manual 'data rates' table says HD 4:2:2 uncompressed 1920x1080 60i (I guess that's 8-bit YUV) is 120MB/sec, 7199.9MB/min, 421.9GB/hour.

Anyway, that's not what you asked, but my point is that it seems to me that PPro2.0 is handling high definition without so much as a hiccup. I'm no expert (far from it), but don't think it's Premiere's fault. My suggestion is to go to both the Sony and Adobe support sites and look for a preset/codec specifically for your camera. I'm using plug-ins from Blackmagic that came with the Intensity Pro card, never tried it with anything else, for instance Adobe's generic HDV plug in that installs with Premiere Pro.

If someone else who reads this tells you I'm full of crap, though, they're probably right. Just my thoughts from my successful experiences with premiere pro 2.0 and high definition.

I don't know what you are talking about.

I have an 2 yeard old PC running Premiere Pro 2.0 without fancy capturing cards, and a couple of months ago I hooked up a Sony Z1 via firewire on my computer, no problems, captured and edited the complete project (2 hours of rushes, one hour edit, a play) without any problems.

I was actually expecting MANY problems, because my 2 year old pc, and all the horror stories about editing HDV, but it really went without any problems.
Almost as fast as editing DV, exept that in the end, I had to render everything back to HDV for the final export... That took me 3 hours for a 1 hour project, still pretty good.

So, I don't know where the problems are, but sure ain't Premiere Pro...

I'd speculate this is crippled in the software until you buy it.
Besides marketing reasons, sometimes certain codecs or other third party software components have to be purchased by the manufacturer on a per copy basis for redistribution. It doesn't matter if it is trialware or retail version. So they cripple these sorts of things to avoid the expense. I'd expect the full version to be fine, obviously this is like buying a car without sitting in it and doing a test drive... so understand your dissatisfaction.

It's pretty well-known that Premiere does not have HDV capability in the trial version. Whether that's right or wrong is up to you to decide, but it's not exactly a secret.

This just underscores the danger of taking Amazon reviews without a large grain of salt. There's always a chance that a comment will get posted by an idiot who's too lazy to read the documentation (obviously not the OP but the review he quoted).

And to move up from 1.5.1 in order to avoid using the Cineform Intermediate is sort of backwards logic: there's evidence that it actually produces better, easier-to-edit video than doing so with native m2ts in Premiere 2.

So this might be one Amazon review that we should ignore...