Shooting weddings with small handicams

[Noa Put]

Originally Posted by James Manford

How much did you pay in the equivalent of £££ pounds ... when you bought it new?

I paid 590 pound tax not included

[Clive McLaughlin]

Originally Posted by James Manford

Littlewoods, have a refurbished one on sale on ebay at the moment with 12 months warranty ... im tempted.

Felling a bit guilty James, I hope you weren't too tempted.

I kind of just bought that one...

Sorry! (but cheers for the heads up.)

It was reduced from £820 to 700, and then a further 15% off at checkout down to £600!

The only other place I saw it was tesco direct at £865!

I'm well happy!!

[James Manford]

Clive don't worry ... I just bagged a pre-owned one for £500 through Gumtree after a little negotiation with the seller.

I was going to buy the Littlewoods one, but thought do you know what ... refurbished and used, whats the difference, not a lot other than the fact i've saved £100 more!

Both of us are owners of this handicam now ... can't wait for it to arrive :) mine should be here tomorrow.

[Clive McLaughlin]

Nice one James! Noa will be proud!

[Peter Riding]

Don't forget folks that the Panasonic TM900 and successors easily compete with the Sony - just that Noa uses the Sony whereas many of us use the Panny's. Likewise they are well known performers and can command a lot of demand and high prices for pre-owned units.

One of my three TM900's is an ex-demo and it actually performs marginally better than the others that were purchased brand new.

Ebay prices can be strange, with people paying almost as much as the brand new price of some goods. One of my pre-owned Sennheiser G3 sets saved me around £100 on the then new price and now its more like £200 as Senny hiked up their prices recently. But other G3's have sold at only £30 - £40 short of the new price which was £415.

Pete

[Chris Hewitt]

James, I did see that refurbished 730 last night on eBay and again this morning. Looks like all three of us were watching. Clive, I'd been checking Gumtree but must have missed that one.
Let's know what you guys think of it and your view as to whether you think it could be a good roving cam on guests outside at weddings here in the UK. I'm not bothered with the audio for that sort of thing.
If anyone hears of a used CX730, let me know; these cameras are like hen's teeth!!!

[James Manford]

Peter, I would happily settle for a Panasonic. But my main cam is an EA50 ... and Noa's been generous enough to contribute a lot of videos showing that the CX730 can be matched up to the EA50 with a little post production...

It should save me a lot of headache from missing any essential shots now ... I always do 'arty' stuff with my EA50 as I use a lot of manual lenses ... but when I need backup wide angle footage this handycam should save me from beating myself up after the event is over! At the moment I was using my NEX 5N as I sold my VG20 when I bought my EA50, but the 5N isn't really that reliable as it over heats too easily.

Now I should be able to just hit record and forget about it.

@Chris yes, I actually got lucky ... I placed bid on a pre-owned one at £700, but lost the bidding war and it ended at £720 'ish' and then came along the Littlewoods refurbed one at £600 after all the discounts! ... Just as I was about to buy I saw one on Gumtree and snapped it up!

[Noa Put]

Originally Posted by Peter Riding

Don't forget folks that the Panasonic TM900 and successors easily compete with the Sony - just that Noa uses the Sony whereas many of us use the Panny's.

Like I said before, there are no bad high end handicams, they all preform very good where each camera has it own strengths and weaknesses, what I found important was that it had a very wide angle lens and at 26,5mm I think it's the only handicam in it's class that goes that wide. The sony cx is also easier to match in post with my nex-ea50 where a panasonic might cause issues.

[Noa Put]

Originally Posted by Clive McLaughlin

Noa will be proud!

nah, not really :) To me a camera is just a tool, if it was called panasonic cx730 I wouldn"t care less, as long as it doesn't break the bank and performs well enough I"m happy. The camera does some things exceptionally well and other not so well, for my use I see more benefit in what it can do well and I just work around it's shortcomings.

[James Manford]

Noa

Need some assistance from you please.

Just got my Sony CX760 about 30 minutes ago (not the CX730 ... they're the same though aren't they?)

How do I set the Gain on this ??? All I see when I press down on the small knob near the lens is exposure so i'm assuming this is the equivalent of ISO/GAIN. When I change it up and down, I don't see a number to actually be able to tell what level it's on, other than what I see with my eyes

How do you do it?

So far the camera is amazing. I can really see this helping me a lot when I go on shoots now. I'm going to sell my Samyang 14mm F2.8 ... don't think i'll need it anymore for wide angle shots as this handicam will suffice.

EDIT: Also in terms of colour profiles, quick glance all I saw was Cinematone. When you say you can match this in post to your EA50, your not using it with Cinematone on are you? it looks too contrasty to me so I want to record flat as possible.

[Noa Put]

How do I set the Gain on this

I have set the dial to "exposure", if you set it to "iris" you can lock the f-stop but the camera will still adjust exposure automatically using gain or shutter.

If you set it to "exposure" the camera tries to keep a constant 4.0 f-stop in bright conditions, it will keep the gain at 0db and when you turn the dial to adjust exposure it will use the shutter to compensate for incoming light.

If you then point the camera to a dark indoor area and adjust exposure it will first drop the shutter to 1/50 and then change the iris to wide open (f1.8) and once that is reached it will add gain.

You can only see the gain values in playback mode (there is a option in the menu to turn that on so you can see what the camera did, but you can't see what it is doing during recording)

The question is, why do you need to see what the camera is doing? You just turn the dial to set the exposure and let the camera handle the rest, the image is perfectly usable up to 24db gain, you can disable the low lux feature so it only goes up to 21db gain but I have this enabled all the time.

About colout profiles, I only know of a x.v. color setting which is set to off on my camera, to what "cinematone" setting are you referring, where do you see this in the menu?

The cx760 is the us equivalent to the cx740 eu version.

[James Manford]

Thanks for that. I wanted to know because I didn't know what steps it took first, but you've just explained all of that now!

I've enabled low lux too which is under 'Manual Settings'

The cinematone feature is under 'Camera Settings' as soon as you get past low lux etc you simply continue scrolling down to see it. I have this turned off, with this turned 'on' the image looks quite dark and contrasty.

The a.x.v is under Image Quality on mine.

[Noa Put]

ah ok, now I see, my menu is in Dutch so I had to look for a different name, this is set to off as well as I can see it raises contrast which I like to avoid, I also have x v setting to off because it enhances something in the image. In that way I have a unaltered image when I take it into post. It's too bad Sony didn't allow the camera settings to show up during recording but only during playback but I guess that kind of cripling happens more to protect higher end camera's.

[James Manford]

For a moment I thought there was a slight difference in firmware with the cx730 & cx760 but yeah, the fact you had it on a different language setting would explain it !!

Any chance when you have a few minutes to spare you can pop up some links to videos done solely with your CX730, or ones where you integrated footage from both the EA50 and the CX730 ...

I've seen some scattered around the forums before, just want to see them again now that I own one too :D (I'm not being lazy, i've searched for your videos but many of them show up as deleted now)

[Noa Put]

here is one for starters, the church footage (in- and outside is all cx730 incl the opera singers at the end, all steadicam footage is canon 550d and all the rest nex ea50.

the tilt shot from the church tower at the beginning of the video was done handheld, then you can see the stabiliser at work.

Sarah + Frederic on Vimeo

will post some more later on, sleeptime now :)