I run cameras at my church, and aside from some badly placed lights waaaaay up in the rafters, the main sanctuary is very very dark. We're talking worse than a wedding reception at Bubba's Crab Shack.

We're shooting with two XL-1 s, feeding s-video outs. Everything's on manual. Oh, and we're way in the back, so our lenses are zoomed almost to the max.

I can get 1/60 + f2.2 and boost gain, but if the preacher's wearing a black suit, forget it. It's either very dim or blown out. We're working with extremes here.

YES, I know the lighting is the fix for this, but we can't afford a new rig yet. Aside from moving the cameras closer to the stage, is there a way to get a brighter picture? What about using different lenses? A $400 lens adapter for the XL1 would be easier to swallow than the $20k lights we need, and a few photogs in our church are willing to let us borrow their still-lenses. Anyone used these before?

I'm stumped.

Try shooting at 1/30. As long as there is not a lot of fast movement it should look ok and will give you about 6 dB of additional brightness compared to 1/60 with virtually no additional noise.

As to using another lens, the CCD block is limited to something like f/1.8 maximum aperture so that would buy perhaps a half stop if you can find an adapter and lens with a usable focal length.

Depending on the church you should be able to add enough interim lighting for much less than $20k