I have two sony pd 150 old i know. So i have been upgrading my gear i have 2 t2i with diff lenses. I pre-ordered a canon xa10 to use as my back cam. But it keeps getting pushed back so I was thinking of canceling my order and getting ether a canon hr s200 and two t2i and a indislidermini. Or getting a Sony HXR-MC50U or a Panasonic AG-HMC40 and a t2i and a indislidermini. Or should i just wait it out and get the xa10. any thoughts or suggestions would be much appreciated.

Blake Tijerina

I'll thow an other option here.

Get a Panasonic GH2 instead.

It will match the T2i footage easier, it will shoot up to the cards limit non-stop and you may find yourself using it as your main camera after you get it on your hands and set a T2i with Magic Lantern (for non-stop recording) as your back cam.
You may as well get one more GH2 to use as a B camera and push the other T2i to slider/steadicam or whatever b-role use.

XA10 is a great camcorder but i believe that you are going to have trouble matching the footage with the DSLRs.

Okay I don't know much about the gh2 but i really would not like to buy different lenses for both cameras or is the kit lens pretty good?

The HMC40 is not so good in low light and the GH2 kit lens is on the slow side too (f4.5-5.6). We had a GH1 with kit lens but sold it and kept the Canon DSLRs.

For the unattended camera use the 550D (T2i) with Magic Lantern loaded for continuous recording. Set it to turn the LCD off and this thing will run for > 90 mins unattended, with only a couple of seconds dropped every 12 mins or so.

Well,

You can get the GH2 with a 20 f 1.7 (40mm equivalent) and add a low cost ($50-100) MF 50mm f1.4 used lens and maybe one more MF zoom lens like the Vivitar Series 1 28-90 f2.8-4 or the 70-210 f3.5.
You can get these on Canon FD mount VERY cheap so having dedicated lenses for the GH2 will not be that big of a problem.
For wide angle (if you really need one) you can get either the Panasonic 14mm f2.5 or a Samyang 14 f2.8 in Canon mount plus an adapter to m4/3 (so you can use the lens with both cameras) or just use what you already have with an adaptor (no aperture control though)
Of course you can always choose the T2i + ML solution which is also a very good choice.

BTW the GH1 and the GH2 are two completely different animals when it comes to low light performance, no comparison at all.

BTW the GH1 and the GH2 are two completely different animals when it comes to low light performance, no comparison at all.

I certainly hope so. The GH1 (even with the hack) was nasty at ISO 800 or higher. We're regularly shooting much higher than that with Canon.

Dave, the GH2 in low light is almost as good as the 5DMkII.
You can certainly do ISO2500 with no problem. From what I have seen the GH2 is about 1/2-2/3 stop better than the 7D/60D/T2i/T3i in low light performance

I'll thow an other option here.

Get a Panasonic GH2 instead.

It will match the T2i footage easier, it will shoot up to the cards limit non-stop and you may find yourself using it as your main camera after you get it on your hands and set a T2i with Magic Lantern (for non-stop recording) as your back cam.
You may as well get one more GH2 to use as a B camera and push the other T2i to slider/steadicam or whatever b-role use.+1 for the GH2. For the price of one 5DII with 24-105mm you can buy two GH2s with 14-140mm kit lens. With ETC you get an extra free telephoto zoom lens with a range of 72.8-728mm at 1080p or 109-1092mm at 720p. Just amazing! The low light performance is amazing too with very little grain even at high ISOs. Moire & aliasing are radically less than with the 5DII. It's more fiddly to operate if you have big hands like mine & compared to the 5DII it feels like a little plastic toy but it does shoot amazingly good video.

Thanks for all your input been kinda looking in to the gh2 but i think ill stick with the t2i ML setup.
as for the canon xa10 it shipped yesterday so I hope to get some test footage and see how well it matches up to the t2i.
Thanks Again for all the input

Make sure you come back with your impressions of the XA10 - AND - how it mixes with DLSR in post.

I'm specifically interested in how it's gain levels are set compared to the ISO settings on DSLRs, and how much noise is introduced when the gain is raise.

Some samples shots would be awesome ;)

Will do. I plan on shooting Saturday.

I replaced my PD170 with a Sony Z5E and a Sony FX1E. They're great.


Regards,

A>

Okay here is some Canon XA10 raw footage it is exported to h.264 with adobe.
YouTube - BoxArtStudio's Channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/BoxArtStudio?feature=mhum)
Feel free to watch my other videos as well (wedding reel, NF Photo shoot)..
I will be putting up the XA10 T2i next now that is rough just to warn you

Okay here is more videos From the XA10 DOF testing i was doing tonight. specs are listed in the video and on the youtube page.

YouTube - DOF Test (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vMf14nT8b0)

YouTube - XA10 DOF (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6qN4pPTSvk)

This is very interesting! I'm actually surprised that it looks cleaner than the T2i at iso 400! A little darker but not bad at all!

I will put this on the top of the list for sure! At 2K with 2 xlr inputs! Cool. Perfect audio and lock down cam.

Please do let us see what they look like mixed in daylight

I need a no brainer cam that looks great on auto. This may be the one!

I will be doing that test this week as I need to find out :). so far the XA10 has been more then I was asking for only paying 2K