Learning to love the A-1...with a question
 

The more I use the A-1, the more I love it.

I am currently filming ruby throated hummingbirds and love what the A-1 can do with this.

More and more I'm using manual focus, zoom and iris. Also, I love the presets, focus assistance, manual nd filters, output gain and exposure lock.

I'm a bit of a control freak and the A-1 is perfect for me with all the control...even though I'm really just a beginner at video. From what I've learned of this camera and the reasonable price for what it provides, it's hard to imagine owning another video camera.

Two questions.

I try different shots with different shutter speeds, f stops etc. On my Canon still cameras, I can retrieve the settings I used for a particular shot...so that I can repeat those settings if I liked the shot.

Question 1.

Is there any way for me to retrieve/view settings I used on footage on the A-1? I'm assuming not but would love to hear that I'm wrong there.

Question 2.

The only section of my A-1 I'm not using is the Position Preset. Can someone give me a quick and dirty explanation of what this is and how this works?

Thanks.

Rog Lee

Rog... The information you want will be displayed on the camera's LCD when you play back the footage.

Actually, I've never played back footage through the A1. I use an HV10 for capturing to disk and it displays f-stop, shutter speed, date and time on the HV10. I expect that info to display on the A1 as well.

Don't know about the position preset. You got me on that one.

Thanks Tripp for the info.

The position preset that I mentioned has the words focus and zoom under it.

I'm assuming that somehow I can set the focus and zoom for a certain situation and use that function to quickly go to a certain focus/zoom setting....???

Thanks again.

Rog Lee

That is exactly what it does. You set a fixed zoom or focus and when you put the on it will goto that value you set. I use it for zoom when shooting sports like basketball. After a zoom in on a goal I use it to return to the zoom left I was at to stay constant for the whole game.

The zoom and focus preset position switches would be *much* more useful if they could be triggered remotely, without having to actually touch the camera. I'm disappointed that Canon doesn't provide a way to do this (no, it's easily not available over LANC unfortunately -- it might be in there, but currently there's no way to access it).

Indeed it would be.

To SORT of get around this for the zoom feature, I will set it which then puts a Yellow square in the zoom range on screen, top left. I Can then try and line it up smoothly with my lanc zoom and still be in the right area. Its a guide and is not perfect but its better than nothing I guess.

There is a setting that allows you to save a frame to the SD card when you press the photo button whilst shooting video. This saves all of your custom preset information with the image, as well as the normal DV/HDV meta data (shutter, apperture, etc.) I don't have the manual to hand, so can't quote you chapter and verse.