Jason,
The only drawback to shooting in b&w -may- be that it leaves you a bit less wiggle room in post. I know that many folks who want to do a b&w piece choose to shoot in color and then use their editor's color correction tools to produce the monochrome version. Not having done this myself I am only passing along what I've learned from others' experiences.

Okay now that this mystery is solved, what does the color gain
on the GL2 do? Or does it just do it much less than my XL1s does?

The color gain works but just some small increments. I didn't know canon states that this is the way to go for B/W! Very strange!

OH No!!
 

Here we go!!! -lol-

Honestly, i have had my GL2 for over a month now and found that this color gain ads like a crispness to the pixels for getting lower light shots. It makes it possible, btu you have to handle artifacts like crisp anti-aliasing edging. Maybe up the softness to over come?

Whats your ideas on this color gain. And lets watch out for color phase!!

What is your definition of color phase?

amateur opinion
 

My view on color phase from recent NLE problems with weird color tones in my captures is that "color phase" is for fixing weird Hue shifts when shooting to get it more in the zone that looks realistic. Sometimes u get realy red shots indoors under natural light. SO u can shift this to fix it up. I think the GL2 is powerful with color enhancements and causes real imbalances in the color spectrum unless u manually work with these controls. Get into them. My Compositing with Premiere to music has improved greatly with playing around with these controls.

Ohh' You know a great way i've found to figure this stuff out..is to actually say what setting you have adjested right at the beginning of shooting at a particular setting. then when u switch anything..say it again and when u edit on PC. You can tell what u did right or wrong.

Just sharing :)

I think you are referring to color shifts. This mainly happens
when the camera is incorrectly white-balanced or when you
have some odd temperature lights in the room. When you
change this in the editing or post you are simply adjusting
the colors (color correction/timing) and/or changing the levels/
hue's.

nope
 

Color phase is what i am talking about.

Go read here. Color correction is onboard.

Have a read.

http://www.canondv.com/gl2/f_color_phase.html

:) I'm a post guy also. But it is nice when u can get what u want with this camera with alittle fiddling. You were speaking of color correction. What program do u use for it? I mainly use discreet combustion 2.0

Ah, I didn't know the GL2 had that function! Thanks for pointing
that out to me.

I have been doing some CC work in After Effects but I'm currently
looking (slowly) at Vegas 4 and Avid to see what they have to
offer all in one package. Basically if I can get a good editor with
good color correction tools and some animation capabilities (to
move footage under my blackbars) then I'm likely to stay with
one package. A friend of mine had AE so I checked that one out
there.

The color part in a video image signal is being defined by 3 (main) parameters:
1. White balance: the ratio between the RGB components, affecting all colors.
2. Saturation: the ratio of the U/V levels vs the luma level
3. Hue the ratio between U and V (or R-Y and B-Y). This can be optained in component form (NLE) by changing this ratio, or in NTSC encoded signals by changing the burst phase relative to the chroma phase, resulting in the U/V ratio change when those signals are being decoded into components.