If you are recording you can change the WB lever between Preset/A/B. But I couldn't change the WB on A while I was recording. So in Jeff's situation he would have been OK if he an indoor WB on A, for instance. And an outdoor WB on B. Then it is just a matter of being familiar with the controls so you can flip the switch without taking your focus off of the Bride/Groom and ruining the shot.

CF unit
 

Anyone out there using the CF unit. Any feedback on it welcome.

I am familiar with the A/B settings, however there are times when the lighting changes dramatically from what it was white balanced to and you want to do a custom. While recording with my Panasonic DVC80 its just a matter of pointing at a white object and press the white balance button and you are done. This has been a standard feature on all Panasonic cameras I have used, however for all the Sony Cams you have to stop recording. Don't make much sense to me.

Thanks David, my point exactly. In my case I had an outdoor WB saved that was of no use as the lighting had changed dramatically from sunny to very dark with clouds.

It's one of those things that unless you shoot weddings or do other run and gun paid work you don't care about.

Edit: I realized as soon as I wrote the last statement here someone will likely disagree or point out I am mistaken. In that case I take it back. Please disregard as it was an offhand comment.

Which is why I am going to stick with panny cams for now. My only problem with Panasonic is that they have abandoned tape formats for P2 and AVCHD. One is expensive and the other is difficult to edit.

Greg -- no ideas for you, but were these Sony batteries or an off brand?

Well actually, if you think about, it would be footage you'd almost certainly have to drop anyway. It would be very distracting to see the wrong colors and then the camera zooming on a white object as you change the MWB and then pull out again to the subject matter.

For that reason I can't get too excited about whether I can change the MWB while recording or not.

My take on the WB while recording is it would be a nice extra. But wouldn't be something you would appreciate until you had to use it.

In my case we sync our cameras up for everything from ceremony thru entire reception, and we do not stop recording for that reason.

I can think of one scenario where the feature would have benefitted me in the past.

We were taping speeches/toasts with PD150 and VX2100 and the speakers were in front of windows. The light coming through the curtains made both indoor and outdoor WB presets undesireable. If I could've pointed at table cloth and set a manual white balance, my footage would've been much better. In post I never did get the footage from the cameras to match, it was bad.

Ditto Jeff. I mostly do multicam shoots and you don't want to stop recording because it would mean re-syncronizing.

Probably still better to resynch than have the footage off for the duration...and possibly be uncorrectable. A pain yes, but at least you'd be back to capturing quality footage.

All of the batteries are Sony brand.

Re: WB for changing conditions. That is what the "auto tracing white balance" (ATW) is supposed to be for but the only time I have ever seen it work seemlessly was on a Sony BetacamSp demo video. It never worked that well for me with any camcorder.

Burning to DVD
 

Does this camera use AVCHD? So what software do most of you use to get capture to computer and then burn to a Blu-Ray DVD?? I know I will need to get a Blu-ray burner to save movies on DVD. How is the quality after burning to Blu-Ray on an HDTV??

No the FX1000 records to HDV tape.
If you were to record to the MRC1 CF recorder, it also records in HDV format.

Burning to DVD
 

So Michael, you say then all I need is Blu-Ray burner and software like Power Director to burn tape in HD to a BD disc. Correct? I have a Blu-Ray player hooked to my HDTV. Then can watch in HD the movies I make with this camera in HD? Thanks for reply

DV or Synch control?
 

Does anyone know if the FX1000 has DV or synch control? I know the Z5 has it, but I see no mention of it with the FX1000.

It would seem to me that if it doesn't have it, it would require a totally manual operation of the HVR-MRC1 unit, making that device far less convenient to use.