Dave,

I see it this way. Your clue. Your new client wants to edit the EX footage themselves. They told you this in advance of the shoot. That tells me that they "know" what they are doing. (you know - professional amateurs as I call them). Then by virtue of that, all you had to ask was which flavour of EX do you wish me to record for you? The rest is up to them. It is their responsibility to carry on as they pay you for your shooting services and that's it.

What their editing capabilities are is really of no concern as you are not being paid to be involved in that part of the production and as they wanted EX footage, you have to accept that they can competently take it from there.

I have had a few jobs (not terribly many) like that and all went perfectly well. I shot, transferred the SxS cards via CB onto their external HD and they were happy clients. No other discussion took place except for payment talk.

Hope all goes better than planned for you.

Well, I spoke to the shop who will be doing the edit. They are using an Avid DS Nitris edit system on Windows XP 64bit and they are saying that this software can't import my EX files directly. I'm not an Avid guy so I don't know what the story is with that program. Here are the options they offered....can you guess which one I'm going to use? ;-)_

<quote>
Our Avid DS Nitris edit system does not support direct import of XDCAM EX files, however we have two options

1) You send us the raw footage on the original SxS PRO memory cards and we rent a Sony PMWEX30 XDCAM EX Memory player/recorder, play back the footage and capture it in real time to our edit system and ship you back the cards.
2) Or you sends us the raw footage on Disc or hard-drive and we import the files into an Avid media composer and transcode the files into a format that the Nitris will recognize.
<end quote>

I think this will work out okay and I want to thank everybody who offered advice. You guys are the best.

The wife never gets hostile with clients. In this instance, after they accused her of trying to gouge them, she politely told them that she did not want their business...

She is a realist - She figured that the "We want you to edit it" comment was worth the paper it was written on. No surprises there :)

Yes if a client accused me of price gouging, I'd send them packing too. They're always free to find someone less expensive.

I wouldn't be surprised if an update might fix this but given the possible cost of Avid upgrades . . .
Hard drive to Media Composer seems like the best bet.

2. On THEIR hard drive. The way they should have worked it out in advance of asking you to shoot EX and not having to involve you at all!!!

Cheers

Bit late but you could always shoot HDV on the EX1 and then dub to tape. People don't really argue with tape which is one of the reasons why I'm hanging on to my Z1. Rather use that than potentially lose a job because the "professional amateur" gets confused by tapeless media.