Phew, what a day
 

I shot a wedding earlier and got hit with a wave of bad events.
The first was I realised I hadn't been recording the congratulations.
Just looking through the lens while the tape was just sitting there.
I dont know what it is about the A1 but this seems to be happening a little more to me than before. Although I think I've learned my lesson now.

Next I realised my locking lever on my merlin plate has come loose when it separated itself from the plate and allowed my camera to slide right off the tripod and hit the ground from about 5 feet high.
It happened in slow motion, honestly.
But from this day forward I will never let anybody complain about the A1's poor quality structure.
The thing just kept on working. The tape was perfect and the only mark was on the lens hood when it hit the ground.

What a machine. What a day.
Rant over, I have another wedding tomorrow, surely it cant be as bad as today.

Wow....

I had my new Compaq laptop slinky all the way down a flight of wooden stairs while turned on once....pretty sure the space/time continuum slowed down there as well.

Glad your camera lived to shoot another day.

Has this ever happened to anyone...

I was at a skateboard park and this kid was running the circut really good so I asked if I could shoot him while he ran the course. I shot him for about 10 minutes and then ended it with a little interview with him talking about how much he likes to skateboard.

Well when it was all over I was pleased, I got some really good shots.. or so I thought. When I got home and viewed what I had shot... well when the camera was supposed to be on shooting, it was OFF.. and when the camera was supposed to be off.. it was ON. I got some really good video of my feet walking.. well you get the idea.

Talk about feeling stupid.. :(

we call that "reverse trigger". I think it's happened to all of us at least once. A big DUH moment, eh? :)

I think I must be King of the Reverse Triggers!

I like cameras that can give a really loud DING and DING DONG for run and gun events.

Apart from not having the camera in record mode while shooting it is also dangerous to view the footage during an event. Sometimes you have a little spare time during a wedding and you rewind the tape to do some quality control. Then somebody talks to you and you forget to fast forward the tape to its last position. Ups, then maybe important scenes are lost.

A big Duh moment is right Bill.
I set the congratulations up again on the way into the meal so
hopefully they'll be happy enough with that.

Wedding today went better thank god.

Although my fan belt is now screaching in my car and I have to go to tomorrows with it like that.
I'll be glad when this long weekend is over.

I did a wedding last friday and after shooting the groom riding away to meet his bride I had to hurry to be there first. So I grabbed the tripod with cam on it, shortened the tripod legs yust enough to fit on the backseats of my car. When I arrived at the brides house and took my cam + tripod from the backseat I noticed that the microphones made a strange angle to the cam. They pointed to the sunshade instead of right to the front. You can imagine how happy I was to notice that it was only a cosmetic problem. My sound was still very sound.

One thing I wish the A1 did have was a tally lamp on the back and top of the camera like many of the professional shoulder mount cameras have... It would be nice...

Thats funny I watched a friends laptop come out of his backpack while riding is motorbike down the motorway at 80 mph....

It actually survived albeit with a few battle scars!!!

J

I have reverse triggered and even no triggered a few times.

I think it's partly a function of that very busy and very small display in conjunction with 45 year old eyes.

I "photo buttoned" once... meaning I hit the photo button thinking it was the top handle start/stop (I wasn't looking)... waiting for the next bit to happen (all the while I'm rolling & don't know it... got some great feet footage :-\ ) Hit start/stop for the next scene... thinking I'm rolling when obviously I stopped the roll. I checked the SD card to make sure how I thought this happened & sure enough there's a still of the start of that fiasco.

I think I've sussed why this was happening to me with the A1.

In this country we are pre-programmed to associate green with go and red with stop (traffic lights) yet with the A1 its green for stop and red for go...
I think maybe when I'm under pressure I tend to revert to whats instinctive.

Running numbers- thats what I look at now.

Ger
I noticed that you have been using the Merlin with your A1. Care to share your settings?
I've had my Merlin for a year now and have used it on my lighter DVC 80 very successfully. I have no problem balancing the DVC 80. However my XH-A1 seems to do the "pendulum" more meaning it just isn't quite static on the Merlin when I move. You might have figured this out already????

I'll post a fresh topic Guy.