Ended up getting booked to shoot a large confernce locally here starting tomorrow morning through Saturday late. Not really excited about it, but whatever pays the bills. The footage was only going to be used for archive, so I had the PD170 lined up as it does a decent job. I was talking with a guy at a local equipment shop while picking up tape stock and he was asking what project I had going on. I mentioned it and he asked if I could do him a favor and test one of the new rigs they just received. He says, "it might make it a bit more exciting." and out pops a brand spanking new Panny HDX900 ready to go. Needless to say, I am a little more interested in shooting.

Bummer is I am directing and switching a show tonight and basically will be pulling it out of the bag and doing run and gun without having read any instructions. I oogled it a bit this afternoon and checked all the settings, but wish me luck. I've been dying to get my hands on one since NAB, but my fear is this might taint me on get the new rig I *was* looking at. :EEK!:

http://www.azsj.org/gallery/files/1/hdx900.jpg

Awww, just throw it in "auto mode" and you'll be all set ;-)

Don

LOL. Yeah...I was just shooting around the office and since shooting the lower-end cameras so much I forgot what having nice depth of field was.
Wowza. And the dynamic range is realllllly nice.

Hi:

Don't forget your focus chart to set the back focus. I just did a four camera location shoot with four of them. Hope that they set up all of the menu items correctly for the look that you want because this camera has really deep and somewhat confusing menus if you are used to prosumer cameras.

Nice camera, great pictures, good ergonomics.

Dan

Hi:

Don't forget your focus chart to set the back focus.

Good call. I hadn't realized that the equipment shop really meant they *just* got it in, but the first thing I noticed was that back focus was off. Well, actually the first thing I notice was I needed to adjust the viewfinder focus.

I did get to peruse the manual after I finished up the show last night, but it was already close to midnight and more than my mind wanted to processes. The menu could keep me busy for months tweaking. I am hoping to get it hooked to a monitor to at least get a basic setup done, but it is 5:30am now and after getting the kids out the door I might only have an hour to get a kit together for the weekend.

I'll be bringing my Betacam...just in case.