HM700 "Breaking News" Live Event Footage
 

This weekend, I was experimenting with the HM700 by recording the gay pride march in Portland, Oregon.

As luck would have it, a small group of anti-gay protesters chose our block to goad participants into verbal altercations. One group of marchers, a chapter of a larger organization known as "The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence", staged a "die-in" in the street in front of the protesters, and I was able to get right into the middle of this with the HM700.

I temporarily set the camera to "full auto". The camera was already set to the first level of neutral-density filter, and it was just after noon on an overcast day.

The video is available on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM9xbLUt9Is

(Obviously, this is politically-charged subject matter... for the purposes of discussion here, let's just keep this about the performance of the camera.)

One thing I noticed is that in full-auto, the audio limit does not attenuate adequately in loud environments... the level meters were mostly pegged and there is some distortion in the audio.

As I get more confident with the camera I'll be doing more and more things manually without wasting much time, but it is nice to know that "full auto" is available in a pinch.

The auto-iris performed quite well, there is only one spot in the video where it clamps down too hastily as a white shirt fills a large portion of the frame.

If the HM700 full Auto is very much like that on my HM100, it is quite impressive the vast majority of the time.

I've had my HM100 in some very mixed lighting/ color temp environments, like deep shade with random big splotches of warm evening sunlit foliage in the background, and the auto white balance has performed wonderfully.
The exposure adjustments it makes are a bit faster than I'd like them to be, but still quite smooth and not stair-stepped or obvious when not looking for the non-huge changes.

It'd be cool if you could user-adjust the speed at which it changes exposure -- like how I can set my EOS 1D pro SLR's continuous autofocus to choose new subjects more quickly or less when a subject moves away from the sensor(s).

I do wish it would lean a touch more toward underexposure when there's a significant patch of bright white in a sunlit frame, especially -- though my black and bright white dog is a challenge in general in the sunlight or contrasty environments.

You can pick 'Slow - Middle - Fast' for the AE speed on the 700.

Nice ... is that a common setting for a pro/shoulder-mount HD camcorder under $10K?