shooting uncompressed with z1
 

I am thinking of possibly trying to shoot uncompressed hd with my z1 and wanted to know what the setup would entail to do this. I am sure it would ned to be some type of tether situation to a computer. We are a mac shop with fcp etc etc. What equipment would be needed. Also, I would love to hear from anyone who is doing this and what their opinion is of shooting like this. Is the picture quality that much better? what are other benefits of this workflow?

you can easily mount a cheap blackmagic HDMI capture card (intensity) into a mac or PC and input the component signal from the Z1 via a cheap component to hdmi converter (120$ on ebay).
Blackmagic is also producing the Intensity pro that has component input, the price of the card being the same that the intensity +converter. Depending the length of cable needed you can choose the best solution for you.
Since the card is able to capture using different codec available on mac and PC (including the excellent cineform), a simple MAC intel with dual boot (XP/OS10) would allow you to overcome any problem (except the fact this will be a bulky setup).
The benefits of going this way will be marginal, since the Z1 has low resolution sensor (960x1080) compared to some other models offering native 1440x1080 sensor.
the only real difference being the 4:2:2 capture versus 4:2:0 HDV provided that you worklflow can keep the proccessing under 10 bits or more.
You can build a small PC , based on a barebone case and motherboard (http://www.sudhian.com/index.php?/ar...w/introduction) with a power supply working with 12v (see car pc http://www.cartft.com/catalog/il/407) and a small 7" Xenarc or lilliput monitor for a few hundred dollars.
you can also take a 110V power supply (fanless) but since hard disk and CPU fan are also noisy, the gain would be minimal.