Is anyone else looking at this, or just me? Maybe someone with a Mac can read his original files and tell me what you see...

I set the second export to interlaced because when the first one was set to "not interlaced" it came out interlaced. So I thought it was worth seeing whether the controls were the wrong way around.

I would not deliberately send you interlaced.

Makes sense. Unfortunately, they BOTH came out interlaced! Maybe someone with the same software can figure out how to keep the interlaced footage from happening.

To be honest, interlaced or not, the footage seems awfully soft. Nothing like the EX1 footage I am used to seeing. Not sure what was going on there. I just went out and shot some outdoor footage with my EX1 in 1080p24, which is as close as I can get to your PAL setting. I'll see what it looks like here in a moment. It was footage from a fountain with the water flowing so it should give some nice "natural" motion.

-P

For those interestied...

I went outside today and shot some footage of a nearby fountain for test purposes. I shot the footage at 1080/24p. Brought the footage into my NLE, transcoded it to uncompressed AVI. Took that AVI into Virtualdub and did a resize to 720p and 720x406 (SD). I then brought those two resized images back into the NLE and monitored the output on an SD broadcast monitor. The 720p version was sharper for sure, but the SD version was sharper than anything I've seen on the HD broadcast channels for sure.

So I made .mp4s of both the SD and 720p verisons and pu them on Youtube. Here they are for your enjoyment:

720p (waiting on HD coversion): YouTube - Fountain Clip2b 720p

SD version:
YouTube - Fountain Clip2b 406p

Great sd from the sony ex1 - at last!
 

Thought I should just say thanks to everyone who's helped me with the EX1 / SD problem.

At last, thanks to Kevan Holdsworth over on the Apple FCP Forum, I read through the XDCAM Transfer Instruction PDF very carefully and there it was all the time!

XDCAM Transfer is the Sony plugin for importing footage - but it also EXPORTS loads of stuff - including either DV PAL / NTSC @ 48k

OR

IMX50 625 (which is Ancient Dutch for Cracking SD) IMX PAL / NTSC @ 50Mb/s
(Choice of other rates available).

My settings are here:
http://www.workingsheepdog.co.uk/video/picture_01.png

This gives you an XML file which you then Import back into FCP using XDCAM Transfer.
EXCELLENT SD footage!

There's no way I'll part with my Sony EX1 now!

Andy, Glad you got it solved. I just couldn't understand why you thought it was the camera. Working on your issue taught me some things to help ME though so I am grateful to you for that.

It is 0db set and Sony says thats how it is...