New Panasonic HMC150 Best For Weddings?
 

I'm thinking the upcoming HMC150 could be the new favourite camera for wedding videographers..

Records to cheap SD cards in AVCHD format max bit rate 24mbs.
CCD sensors so no rolling shutter problems.
New improved sensors with better low light performance.
Quite small and very well balanced.
Wide angle lens, 13x zoom.

..it will be interesting to see what Sony brings out to compete with this camera, but almost certainly it'll have CMOS sensors with rolling shutter problems so not ideal for weddings.

This could be a promising camera for weddings, but that depends on the low-light sensitivty and how people feel about the AVCHD workflow. The current hot camera for wedding videographers is the Sony Z7U, which reportedly works very well in low light and offers a choice of tape or flash based recording. The Sony EX1 is also interesting for good low-light and depth of field control due to the larger sensors, but the memory cards are expensve and some are saying they aren't happy with the camera controls and general usability for wedding purposes. As far as rolling shutters are concerned, that's bothering some videographers but apparently not their customers, and there are fixes for the half-frame flash effect which can be done in post.

The HMC150 is a good move for Panasonic thanks to the much more affordable memory compared to P2, which matters for those of us who like to shoot several hours of footage at an event. We'll see whether the camera as a whole is a good fit for the demands of wedding and event videography.

anyone know the projected retail for the HMC150???

thanks,
brendan

Right now they're saying under $4,500 USD.

I've got my eye on this one as well.

Same CCD's at the new HVX200a and HPX170 cameras.

Why is CMOS' rolling shutter a problem for wedding shooters? If anything, we're the least affected by it.

Flash photography. You get a split screen effect. I've learned to live with it, and haven't heard a client complain about it, so I don't worry about it.

As Ethan said, the rolling shutter tends to cause photo flashes to only affect part of the image instead of all it, which some videographers find annoying when trying to do slow-motion effects with the resulting footage. One solution is to slap a white transparency over an affected frame in post to make it look more like a full-frame flash, but that's obviously some work if you have a lot of flashes.

rolling shutter is a huge problem i guess it's ok when your watching at real time but slowing the clip down to 50% then you can notice it looks very bad.

Rob