I think that Avid still think that they are the dominant force in the marketplace.

Thanks for all your replies!

I downloaded a demo version of Sony Vegas and it seems pretty straightforward to work with Xdcam hd compared to Premiere.
It's ashame Adobe's waiting for all the other nle to support it before they even think about it, but it's just as usual I guess.

Tell me if I'm wrong but 1 hour of xdcam hd shot at 35Mb would take just over 100gb of hdd storage, which means for a 3 camera shoot (a 2 hour program) we would need roughly 1000Gb of hdd storage???

No, XDCAM HD is 35 MegaBITS not MegaBYTES.

Around 1 hour of XDCAM HD footage at the HQ setting will be slightly short of 23 gigabytes of storage space. So for 3 hours of footage you will need roughly 70 gigabytes of hard drive space.

Thank you Simon :)

Simon is exactly right. An empty disc will show 65-70 minutes available when shooting 35mb. IOW, you get slightly more than hour with a 23gb disc.

-gb-

Yes, it all depends on what you are shooting. High motion scenes with a lot of camera movement will give you less minutes. You will get a min of 60 mins, but mileage will vary on the type of footage.