A little FYI on the HV30 cell phone trick.

BETTER GET A MINI SD CARD FAST. THEY ARE BECOMING OBSOLETE. Could not get one at STAPLES, WALMART, OR EVEN BEST BUY.

Don't worry about that. You can get MicroSD card with SD and MiniSD adapter included. They are everywhere in ebay.

Taky,

What software you used to downconverted the HD footage? I used Vegas Pro 9 to rendered Mpeg2 for DVD but I am not very happy with the quality. It just not sharp like a good movie DVD.

I use Adobe Premiere CS4 for editing. Premiere licensed the Main Concept mpeg engine to export to MPEG-2 is very disappointing. So now I will export to a Matrox HD AVI. then use Procoder to do the encoding.

I have both the GL2 and the Canon Vixia HV30. As others have said the HD quality from the HV30 is awesome, BUT in low light the HV 30 doesnt do that well in my opinion.

I am facing a similer dilemma, Do i sell my almost 2 year old GL2 and upgrade to another Prosumer HD camera...ie the Canon XH A1 or do i continue as i am? A majority of the work i do is for the web and cant be viewed in HD anyway. Often times on a multicam track at a bitrate of 3mps only pros can tell the difference.

Then there is the capture issues... Do u want tape, HD, SD card, etc? Recently my captured Video Hard Drive died, but no fear I have a clone back up on another hard drive in the puter..(I think this is called redundant) so I pulled the good hard drive out of my computer and guess what... it slipped out of my hands onto the concrete floor! It was ruined... I was sick at this, but i still had my tapes to go back to and recapture.

I know its enough to drive ya crazy! I would like to buy a third camera, and am leaning towards another HV30 of perhaps i will try an SF10..

But I will always have my GL2 as my A camera until I replace it with another prosumer camera..

I sold both of my GL2 in 2007 and start taping in HD. There is quite a bit of learning curve and change in workflow. I'm glad I did that 3 years ago. Now I'm all ready to go. You never know when you will have a client ask for HD / BluRay. If you start learning at that point, it might be too late.

Now I'm using XH-A1s as main cam. Another XH-A1 as b-roll. HV30 as backup and mount on steadicam. For about 2 years, I use HV30 as b-roll cam. Need to color match the output in post from XH-A1 and HV30. Color matching XH-A1 and HV30 | L.A. Color Blog

I am with you about tape. It's very reliable. For weddings that I did, there is no second take. Tape is still the most reliable storage medium.

HV30 is a consumer cam so it's not the best low light camera. However, learning the light trick to lock down gain, it does help a lot as you have a clean video. I can then adjust the brightness in post.