DV Info Net - Test Driving an XH A1

I recently shot with an XH A1 on a side project. Having used the XL2 and GL2 in the past the first thing I notice was the clarity of the XH A1. The layout of the custom presets resembles the menu layout of a Varicam, which I have grown accustomed to. The size and weight of the camera was nice, not intimidating to my subject and was easy to travel with. I set out a couple of hours on Saturday afternoon after the Chelsea vs Blackburn game to shoot a thumbnail doc of a friend mine. I grabbed a 1K soft box, wireless lav, bounce, a tripod, and a black backdrop from the studio. Production was, start to finish, about two and half hours, with 45mins of footage in the can, plus another hour for pints.

Rob Brazius, the in house editor, was kind enough to cut the piece on FCP. Checking the footage on a broadcast monitor the first thing to jump out was the rich blacks and the clean colour separation. The only hiccup we had was during capture Rob had set the firewire setting for Sony HDV, which turns out not recognize XH A1. The issue was quickly resolved with the switch to HDV Basic. Batch capture proved to be a learning experience. Due to the long GOP factor of HDV we received error messages of drop timecode. Changing timecode numbers and a couple of ‘Capture Now’ we ingested all the footage into the system. Three hours later the piece was cut and sent to Steve Duke for Flash compression, six hour later it was cooked and posted on the web. Over all the XH A1 was pleasant shooting experience.

Setting
HDV 60i
Manuel mode
Non-drop timecode
Shutter indoors 1/100 F 2.0
Shutter outdoors 1/250 F 8.0 w/ wide angle adapter
Presets
Gamma Cine 2
Knee High
Black Middle
Master Ped –1
Setup level 0
H DTL freq Middle
Everything else was set at 0

Link to the piece
http://bluebarnpictures.com/blog/?p=132

David H Castillo
Director of Photography
Blue Barn Pictures, INC.