how well does the HD100 do shooting sports?
 

I like this camera a lot and I want to purchase one, and I want to shoot high school sports with it. I know that some HD cameras don't do that well with fast moving objects, so how well does this camera do shooting sports?

sports shooting
 

I've been using mine filming chess with no problems

Roflol!!!!

The vast majority of the shows we produce are sports-related, including the 2 new ones on Cowboy Mounted Shooting. Very few things are faster than rodeo-type events with more quick changes of directions which require fast, whip movements; the bane of the digital camera. Typically, pans with digital should be done according to film speed vs. degree of arc specs to avoid distrotions and dancing in the background. With the right shutter speeds and an understanding of the digital retrictions, the 100's work well. For slow motion though, you need to come out of the component ports and shoot in 720/60p. Also, you need to maintain image position in the frame so that the viewers' eyes are constantly focused on the subject and not the background which dances as do all digital cameras. That means practice keeping the subject centered and not moving from right to left in the frame. I think with practice, you'll find very few cameras in the sub $10k range that provide this type of performance. We have 6 of them working currently and post is a very straight-forward thing. I think you'll find them more than acceptable in the performance you're looking for irrespective of the type of sporting event you're shooting. IN fact, for 2nd Unit, we had an experienced cameraman, Warren Schultz who's good at digital but had never ventured into the fast-paced world of mounted shooting and, after a day or so of practice, even though he was sick as a dog with the flu, his footage was remarkable.

The on-the-shoulder form factor makes this camera a slam dunk (pardon the pun) for shooting sports compared to the other sub-10k models out now. While the Canon has the same on-the-shoulder form factor, the full-auto lens is terrible for shooting sports. It's laggy and just feels completely wrong. I tried doing sports with an XL1 a while back and I just couldn't do it, there was no way it would ever look as good as a nice manual lens. Maybe they've improved it, but somehow I don't think they could ever beat the feel of your fingers actually physically moving the glass around in the lens.

Anyway, I'd hold off on buying a camera until the 200/250 come out so you can record HD at 60p. 30p just isn't enough for sports, and you can only do 60p in standard def at the moment. If you're primarily buying it for sports, it makes no sense to buy an HD camcorder and run it in SD all the time.

I know I use this example footage a fair amount (shameless, I know) but if it can handle motocross then I can't see it falling apart with football, baskectball, etc.. http://www.danielpatton.com/jvc/MotoJVC-HD.wmv

There's a world of difference in the amount of temporal detail you need to be able to make out between motocross and a ball game like football or basketball. Football especially if you're going for an "NFL Films" sort of look, you definitely need the ability to slomo your footage, and 30p falls apart under slomo.

We have some basketball and volleyball footage up at http://sportcast.mit.edu/ . I've found that using a 1/60 sec shutter speed with motion smoothing gives reasonable results even with inexperienced operators, but it's still nothing like the feel of actual 60 Hz (frames or fields).

Wow, Keith, seeing what you're doing really makes me wish I was in the MIT area, I'd love to check out your setup. The engineering is pretty much beyond me, but let me know if you want any advice about the shooting side of things, I shoot pro sports here in Minneapolis for FSN and the like.