I've read all the threads so far involving the presets and also the pro's and cons regarding adjusting the camera's many settings or just dealing with it all in post.

I personally would rather deal with it all on my computer regardless of the extra rendering time as I have no time constraints to worry about.

So, to get to the point, I'm trying to work out what would be the optimal basic settings, to give me the best footage for dealing with later on, on the computer. Should I just leave the default settings, or do some settings need to be adjusted...? They say to shoot flat, but I'm not familiar with the settings enough to be sure exactly what to do, and haven't come across a post where someone has disclosed the 'shoot flat' settings they use.

Any help on this issue would be greatly appreciated...

Hi Steven,

I'm in the same situation. I wish to shoot "flat", maximum dynamic range and faithful colors, and produce the "look" in post.
Being new to the A1 and camcorders in general I am having trouble understanding the full effect of Knee Point, Master Pedestal etc. (even with Canon's extensive documentation on the subject *cough*), thus preventing me from effectively developing the presets myself.

I have been using the -3dB clean, +6 and +12 presets available from http://www.fxsupport.de/20.html.
The color reproduction seems accurate on my PAL A1 and the image in general provides a good basis for postprocessing. Is it optimal? No idea :)

In general I would want the image that enters A/D conversion and than compression prior to recording to tape to be as close to the final image as is practicable. This will hopefully reduce the opportunity for introducing additional image processing artifacts in post. And I would expect that selected image processing, such as noise reduction prior to compression, could help the compression process.

Keep in mind that what is on tape is nothing like a RAW image from a still camera, it has an 8-bit dynamic range, probably 4:2:0 signal, with significant compression. Something very roughly akin to a 45 kB JPEG image for each field.

However, I fear you really need to experiment a bit with the camcorder and your NLE to determine whether in-camera presets or NLE effects come closer to giving you the results you want. There are too many variables in individual shoots and and uses to make a blanket statement that fits all users and uses, especially if time is not an issue. And if time is not an issue, there is plenty of time to experiment.

Chris discusses this nicely in his post at : http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=96756