Wondering if anyone's working on book for XH A1, like Barry Green did for DVX 100? Searched around, didn't find anything except for the VASST video.

I have an extensive outline and several portions fleshed out, the trouble is that color printing is pretty expensive. Thought about an electronic version for customer print-on-demand. Haven't given up on it.

I'm down for it if you do it, certainly be worth 50 bucks for me to have it handy in the field.

Ditto. I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

Please Chris go for it.
I bought my A1 few months ago and the basic operation is quite simple for an amazing result, but the potential of the cam is such that it would be great to have a good book to help go further,
In fact what is needed is a an "Idiot guide to filmmaking with the A1". Focussing not only on the how but also explaning the why. The A1 is opening a world of tremendous opportunities to journalist and documentary filmmaker. Many of them with no previous experience as cameraman.
The book I want, would guide me in becomming not great cameraman but a verstile and polyvalent operator able to front a diversity of field situations and bring back the images and sound needed to tell the story.
There is lot of good books for the aspirant moviemaker but for the journalist-documentarian there is very little available. Hope you'll do it.

Chris, I run a publ. business. Colour print is quite reasonable today. In Oct. I'm publ. a 600 page book about Structured FrameMaker that I and a collegue authored - every page in 4C!

Conventional or electronic - count me in as well!

Sounds great, i am just a newbie and would love to have some more knowledge about the camera and filmaking in general and depth.... count me in...

Chris, do you have any table of contents of your outline?

I'd be on board to buy the book as well. It's always nice to have a printed reference.

Try a place like www.Blurb.com (I've used them for photo albums), and people can pay for their books when they have them printed out. You can set the price of your book, as well.

The Blurb software isn't the best, but it's free. The biggest pain is uploading the finished book. Even over broadband, uploading a 600 MB file takes some time.

Brilliant Idea!
Count on me too!

Interesting project, but not done in a day or week. A book is a traditional and well-known "media", but does it not seem more suitable to have (YouTube) clips with the different chapters instead of printed pages?

Count me in too. I really like the idea of incorporating video clips.

It's amazing how willing we all are to give Chris Hurd some extra work.

Yeah, I gotta say, all I had in mind was a printed (or printable if it's an e-book) field guide that you could throw in your camera bag and refer to out on location. Just a question of whether or not it would sell enough to justify putting the effort into it.

But video clips, sorry... I can't afford the time nor the money to create them just to put 'em on YouTube... to accomplish that will take a better person than me. Besides, a couple of different training DVDs have already been done.

i would love to have a manual and be able to reference your experience and knowledge. I've moved to Burundi, however, and internet is sketchy at best... downloading a manual would be near impossible. Also, to order a physical manual and have it sent would be prohibitively expensive. What about selling a CD or DVD containing the manual? it could be sent through regular mail and would be cheap to produce... just an idea...

Just a question of whether or not it would sell enough to justify putting the effort into it.

Depends on the effort.


I can't afford the time nor the money.

Time = Money - one is redundant.

Writing a book is not that simple - otherwise anyone would do it. And, a full featured book would probably be ready when they "new" A1 is out for sale. If "A2" = 90% of A1 then it would be worth it, given there is enough buyers (of both camcorder and book).