After everyone's input to my previous posts and just general reading of this amazing forum, I bought the A1. My first few days with it have been great. There is a learning curve, but I find the camera fairly intuitive. I started by shutting off ALL auto functions and working from there. Presets are a lot of fun to play with as well. So far, my footage (shown on my 1080p 46" Sony Bravia) looks amazingly good considering my short time with the camera.

Here's my exposure question - my video shoot is this week, taking multiple shots of controlled fires (it turns out no explosions will be occurring as I originally mentioned in my earlier posts). The fires are of clothing fabrics to test their resistance to burning. I will be using all manual exposure settings and locking them. Before the fire starts on the mannequin, I will be setting exposures. When the mannequin is ingnited and the clothing burns, any advice on how to handle the brightness of the flame? I don't want to blow everything out. My thought is to keep the room very well lit and try and offset the brightness of the flame.

Suggestions will be greatly appreciated. BTW, I'm doing a "dry run" today with my charcoal grill in my yard and some match light charcoal. That flame should be pretty intense and might simulate what I'll be experiencing in the lab.

Stuart

I answered my own question... I taped a fairly large BBQ fire with great success in fully manual mode. No exposure issues at all, but also good ambient light outside (late afternoon shade). I needed to use ND filters to keep the f stop at around 2. I'll definitely need good lighting units in the lab.

I also tried out my HV20 today... I've had no time to practice with it, but out of the box the colors are terribly over saturated. Image sharpness is good, but overall I need to learn how to tweak this camera to be a functional B unit. Overall, the HV20 seems like a great little cam. The A1 is incredible - after really taking the time to practice with the settings, I'm already pleased with the results. I'm even more happy to know I can make it better with more tweaking.