Steady Shot On or Off
 

I saw a thread on the VX2100 board that suggested turning steady shot off when using a tripod (steadycam also ?)
Can someone give some more info as to pro's and cons of doing this
Thanks

The "collective wisdom" is to turn off steadyshot for tripod work. It can cause sudden jerks during a pan or tilt. However my experience is that there are a lot of variables to this equation, and you really need to experiment a little in your particular situation. I think activating steadyshot when you are zoomed out wide on a tripod is usually a bad idea - and not needed as well.

However, if you're zoomed all the way in to a telephoto shot then you very well may want to activate steadyshot. I have experimented with this a lot while filming performances at a distance of over 100' from the stage. In this situation steadyshot vastly improves things. It almost never creates a problem with panning or tilting in this situation, and it really smooths out any vibration or bumps during camera movement. In fact, a couple days ago I shot a whole performance with closeups using a 2x telephoto adaptor on my PDX-10. I was zoomed in to the max (24x equivalent) such that a singer's head and chest filled the whole frame. This type of shot would not have been usable without steadyshot - just BREATHING on the camera creates movement in a situation like this! The only times when I've seen a problem with steadyshot in this situation was during a very fast pan, and that's something I rarely do.

I occasionally use a Glidecam 2000 with my PDX-10. In this case I found that activating steadyshot created jerky movements that looked bad, and I liked the results better with it turned off.

So I would encourage you to try some experiments for yourself and learn what to expect from the optical image stabilization under different conditions.