So are all you HDVers using the camera audio?
 

Are you guys using or planning on using the in camera audio even though it is compressed in HDV mode?

Or are some of you guys just going to record to DAT or to a HD recorder?

I have read in some other posts on other forums that the compressed audio is "ok" but will not hold up well if the audio is edited very much.

Any comments?

Good question Greg!
My camera should be arriving tomorrow (according to Amazon UK) and that is one of the first things I'll be looking into.
My mate is a professional broadcast sound guy and works on lots of shoots with me - he's going to run some tests with his mixer and mic into the camera. It's going to be used for broadcast work here, so the sooner it's set up the better. The BBC in Cardiff has already bought a number of these cameras and they don't bother with DAT for the type of work they'll be doing, so it's all going to be in-camera audio (though not with the onboard mic...)
I'll be posting our findings just as soon as we do all the tests.

Robin

I get my Z1 in 2 days. :)

For dialog and similar frequency range, the camera audio is great. The compression format is very efficient, but you WILL notice some aliasing in the extremely high frequencies. We tested this pretty thoroughly when we worked on the HDV book. You can see the waveform diffs immediately with high frequency information, but for dialog and mid level stuff, it just isn't a problem at all. It's a myth. Things like cymbals, triangles, etc with a very long decay will start to fall apart. You won't so much hear it as see it, and of course it's not the format you want to be editing in, either. You'll want to be converting it to wav or aif for editing. (editing meaning anything more than cutting) EQ, reverb, compression will only serve to amplify the weakness in the extreme ranges if you edit as MPEG.