How to Import Sony PMW-F5/F55 Footages to Sony Vegas

November 19, 2013 6:31 pm / Posted by Ian Lam to Video Conversion

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PMW-F5 and PMW-F55 are two of the new CineAlta 4K digital cinema cameras of Sony which can record superb footages of XAVC 4K and 180 fps XAVC 2K/HD. These new camera models are now reaching to the top of the high-end professional camcorder market. However, the XAVC recording format coming out along with the PMW-F5/F55, is not yet as popular as the cameras so that it is hard to find an editor to edit/conduct post production to such new format footages.

Fortunately, there's Sony Vegas! Sony Vegas Pro 12 is the best editor that natively supports the Sony PMW-F5/F55 XAVC format footages mainly (maybe) because they both are products of the same company. But since the older version of Vegas like Sony Vegas Pro 8.0/9.0/10 does not support XAVC format, here I outline how to import Sony PMW-F5/PMW-F55 XAVC to Sony Vegas, including Vegas Pro 12.

• Part 1: How to Import PMW-F55/PMW-F5 to Sony Vegas Pro 12
• Part 2: How to Import PMW-F5/PMW-F55 to Sony Vegas Pro 8.0/9.0/10

How to Import PMW-F55/PMW-F5 to Sony Vegas Pro 12

Since Vegas 12 natively support the XAVC format, to import Sony PMW-F5 XAVC to Sony Vegas Pro 12 could be very easy:

1. Go to File / Project and look for Import.
2. Locate the camcorder within the Source menu.
3. Within the Destination menu, pick a location to move the files.
4. Click OK. This will begin the process of moving files from camcorder to computer.

How to Import PMW-F5/PMW-F55 to Sony Vegas Pro 8.0/9.0/10

As have been mentioned above, the older version of Vegas such as Pro 8.0/9.0/10 does not support XAVC as the Vegas 12, so if you don't want to pay extra money to buy or update your Vegas to version 12, you need to do as follow:

To edit Sony PMW-F55 XAVC in Sony Vegas version 8.0/9.0/10, first you need to use this XAVC Video Converter (XAVC Video Converter for Mac) to help you convert XAVC to Sony Vegas MPEG-4/H.264 format:

Download the footages from PMW-F5/F55 to your computer, open the XAVC Converter and then drag and drop the XAVC files to the main interface of the program directly. Tips: multitasking is allowed.

To convert PMW-F5/PMW-F55 to Sony Vegas 8.0/9.0/10, directly hit the "Convert to" - "Sony Vegas" to choose H.264 or MPEG-4 as the output format. These presets are perfectly optimized for the older version of Vegas.

After the settings, you can then press the "START" button on the bottom right of the pane to begin converting PMW-F5/F55 XAVC to Vegas. The conversion will last for a while. When the conversion is over, you can import Sony PMW-F5 XAVC to Sony Vegas to edit with ease.