After ditching my Z1 in the sea work is upgrading me to a Z5 ... there's a lesson there! Im reading reviews for the camera and see that it is possible to record in SD straight to compact flash. I edit on Avid MC and wonder if anyone has any experience of how easy or not it is to get the video off copact flash and into Avid MC.

 

Not sure with standard def on the Z5.  But I've had customers use the Z7U capturing HDV to the compact flash (the files are .m2t).  Avid would import the .m2t files (with timecode) directly.

Kane Peterson
Midwest Media Group

I use my Z7 a lot in SD. The files are captured as AVI Type 1 files, which import quickly into AVID.

For one on-going project I don't even bring the project to AVID but use another program to encode directly from multiple AVI files to  one finished WMV file for upload to the client's server.

I have a Z7 and the files import to MC easily. But with SD clips, MC doesn't recognize the time code, so every clip starts at 10:00:00:00. That might be a problem if you are recording simultaneously on tape and would like to keep the tape as backup copy. With HD clips, time code imports fine.