I have been doing some home movie transfers shot with my XL1s over the past few months, before selling my final XHA1s and say goodbye to tape forever, and was remembering how wonderful it was (for me) coming from TV News and using a Betacam camera to the XL1s for home projects, and early business ventures.

It was a shoulder mount camera with an extended and sharp eyepiece. It balanced well, and I got rock solid shots. When we upgraded to the XHA1s, I never could figure out why they stopped using the shoulder mount concept.

I am trying to figure out the best way to use the XA30, which mainly was purchased from our performance work (we got 2) and they should do fine for that.

The price range we were looking at (under $1500 each) limited us. 1080 will be fine for the next year, if I had 4k, it would be for promotional work only.

JUst for kicks, anyone know of a full HD card based camera that has a form factor similar to the XL1s?

Like you spent years on Beta, Beta SP, Digi-Beta then XDCam.

I think the closest form factor to the XL1s with interchangeable glass and a camera that still produces very good full HD pics (Important! When set up correctly) but on cards is the ubiquitous evergreen Sony EX3..

I can't bring myself to get rid of the one I have as time and time again it can cover jobs that requires an 18-22 x B4 servo zoom. I use 2/3" glass on it. It sort of has the benefits of the traditional broadcast 2/3" ENG type cams and can use those long servo zoom ENG lenses that we are familiar with. We run the the B4 config with V Loc batteries. In standard form with its stock 14 x lens and original BPU batteries it makes the EX3 a reasonable sized/weight package similar to the XL!s.

If you don't want to use the expensive SxS cards you can buy decent SxS to SD card adapters and run the much cheaper SD cards. In my experience good quality cards seem to be as reliable as the original SxS spec so I haven't been nervous using them in place of the SxS stock. The EX3s have 10-bit 422 SDI out so if you want a higher bit rate good quality file you can always run an external ProRes recorder.

Often the big PDW XDCam and the FS7 sit on the bench while the EX3 delivers the goods. Today with a bit of shopping around you can get a good one for around $2K. All in all a lot of bang for the buck.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

Thanks Chris, lots of food for thought!!!