Hello, this is my first post here. I have spent a few days reading up on different topics and have learned sooo much - you guys really know your stuff!! Anyway, I would appreciate any input people could give me on the following:

The church I attend is looking to upgrade our current recording setup (Cheap panasonic camcorder and a Sony DVD recorder) to a prosumer camera and a Mac laptop with FCP (I'm pretty decided on the computer as I'm a mac guy). Our immediate goal is to get videos of sermons up on our website and once we get that sorted putting them on DVD.

The church is not a very big sanctuary (approx 35' x 15') and is a reasonably low ceiling with fluro lighting. The only daylight would be from 2 windows behind where the camera would be situated. There are also some track lights above the pulpit and music area at the opposite end of the sanctuary from the camera.

I thought I was pretty set on the Canon XL2 as I'm really interested in shooting native 16:9 in 24p for our stuff. I called zoto digital to get a price and the gentleman spoke with me at length about the new A1 HDV cam that canon is bringing out next month. I now feel like I'm back to square 1. I must admit that I was quite taken by the XL2 when I saw it at B&H. I guess I am a little wary about waiting to purchase the A1 as it would be part of the first run of a brand new camera that a large pool of users have not had their hands on. But is it worth putting $3,550 into a SD camera when the future of things is HD? The A1 does seem to have a cool feature set containing some things that may be useful to us (the new autofocus in particular as sometimes people with very minimal experience will be operating the camera), but the XL2 is tried and tested by many a videographer with excellent results. My head is spinning so any input anyone has would be greatly appreciated. Also, please excuse me if I have placed this long post in the wrong section.

Regards,

Andrew

You probably spoke to Brian at Zotz. He gets a lot of information and is a cool dude. In the environment you will be recording in, I would go with the XL2. I have shot a lot of video in churches with the XL2 with all success. I just purchased a 2nd XL2 that I now want to sell, but that has nothing to do with it's quality. My desire to capture nature in a higher resolution is increasing and I want to migrate to HDV. But with your shooting environment, it sounds like an XL2 is the best solution. If you are interested in getting a VERY new XL2 with only 2 hours on it, let me know. Most of my projects however are standard def and creating a dvd is easy-no image size converting.

Questions you need to ask yourself...

Do you need high definition?
Can you edit, distribute high definition?

With an XL2, things are simple and beautiful. With me, I plan on keeping 1 XL2 and hopefully aquiring an XHA1 for nature videos. Hope this helps.