On the Waterfront
 

I went to Sarnia, Ontario, Canada on Saturday to shoot some video with my new Canon XA20. The video was shot in 30p, 24Mbps bit rate, MP4 format and the 'cinema' filter on the camera was used. Light colour grading was applied using the Colour Curves tool in Sony Vegas Platinum Movie Studio. The video was rendered out to .MOV format, with a bit rate of 8000Kbps.

Some of the pans in the video are a bit crappy, because I don't get many opportunities to shoot fairly fast-moving subjects and I haven't developed enough skill with this sort of thing. Plus the Manfrotto HDV701 head I'm using on my tripod isn't the smoothest when it comes to tilting and panning. I'm thinking about getting a Sachtler Ace tripod to replace the Manfrotto; I checked out an Ace in a dealer's showroom recently and immediately found its fluid head to be superior to the one on the Manfrotto.

To sum up, the more I use my XA20, the more impressed I am with it. While it's not perfect, it's a lot of camera for the money and a pleasure to use. The viewfinder alone is so effective that I used it for 90% of the shooting I did.