I'm a commercial television video shooter/editor, and I just received my new NEX-EA50 this week! Yea!

I just have one operation question that's puzzling me. For my first shoot with it I ran into a situation as I sometimes do, where the subject was lit a lot more than the background. I was shooting in a black box theatre during a dress rehearsal, and the lighting wasn't completely evened out yet. If an actor walked downstage to upstage, they gained about 2 stops, so I had to rely on the auto exposure to ride the light level. Unfortunately, as the auto exposure was looking at the entire frame, and my first priority was to the foreground subject, it didn't make very good decisions, and often over exposed the subject.

On a DSLR, typically there is a way of shifting the auto exposure up and down to compensate for different light situations. Similarly, on my old JVC HM-100 camcorder (a bizarre little thing which paled in comparison to the EA50) there was a lever on the back that controlled the auto exposure.

At a glance, I'm not seeing anything quite as straightforward on the EA50, but I'm thinking there must be some method of forcing the auto exposure to under or over expose.

Any suggestions?

Ahah! Just after I posted (and I've been trying to figure this out for hours now), I figured it out: Sony calls it "AE Shift". Seems different manufacturers call it different things (my Pentax calls it "Av"), so I didn't know what to look for. At first I was worried that you could only turn it on/off with a custom button, but when I tried it (set to button 5), a highlighted EV value popped up, and I could instantly change it with the data wheel. Neat!

One of those features that I'm surprised they didn't put on one of the buttons by default.

Really not digging the manual, btw. Sure it's nice to have a pocket manual, but I was expecting the DVD pdf would come with a more extensive explanation of features. I'm glad this forum is around.