Went out shooting with Gary, Adam and Mark today, with the idea of doing a little camera comparo.

We shot with a Canon XL-H1, a Panasonic HVX-200, and a Sony PDW-F350 (XDCam). Thanks very much to Steve at Z-Systems for the XDCam, and thanks to Adam for the Panasonic. We also shot some 16mm (color reversal), just so that we could say we did.

I’ll get more substantial information up Monday, but I wanted to post a quick note. Results so far are:

1) One of our Canon XL-H1s is broken. The viewfinder is jittery and jumping all over. Ugh.

2) Nobody in the Twin Cities has P2 cards for rent on short notice.

3) Final Cut Pro only supports XDCam footage at 25mbps.

4) The Sony XDCam system is really, really nice.

I finally get XDCam. I finally understand why we need to drop about $100,000 on XDCam hardware. I’m ready to shill for Sony. I take back everything bad I’ve ever said about them. Well, no, not that last one.

More next week!