I've not yet had a chance to lay hands on AF100, But I'm confident that it would meet or exceed my expectations, and allow me to do what I've always wanted to do without compromise. What I want to do is make features in my home town with local talent without having to beg for money, fill out grant requests in triplicate, or spend years in development hell. My wife is a writer and we have a stack of scripts ready to go. We have a strong community of amateur actors that do it for the love of it, usually community theatre, with no expectations of income. What I envision is community cinema, where you invest the time it would take to mount a play, and at the end you have a movie, that could play anywhere.
The key is to at least produce a product that would appear to be a real movie, perhaps not a big blockbuster epic, but a small 70's drama is possible. Technology has been creeping closer for the past few years and I think with this camera in is here. Some may prefer to wait for whatever sony or canon my have in the offering at this price point, and to be honest, by the time my next project is ready to go there may be another contender as well, but if I was starting today, this would be it.
Concerns over whether it would be universally accepted for broadcast, should not be the first consideration for an artistically inclined production. Super16 is not considered to be HD by most of the big broadcasters, but it did not stop the production of best picture contenders 2 years in a row from using it.
Also consider that most of the cameras that are regularly discussed here, that any of us can realistically afford, are also not rated as approved as unlimited A-camera for HDTV. The pinnacle of affordable access to tv came with mini-dv. The DVX-100 or sony pd-150/170 were regularly accepted for broadcast, for reality type programming on MTV and other small networks, but on stepping up to HD most networks want a noticeably superior product. Something that small chips and long gop codecs can't achieve. I'm sure in a few years when all the channels are all hd all the time, standards will be lowered again for low end stuff. If a channel is going to finance your show, you have to deliver their standard no matter what camera you have or want to use.
So you have to go back to what you want to use it for. The AF-100 is marketed as an affordable digital cinema camera, it is not marketed to wedding videographers, as is the dvc-80, It is not marketed to news organizations or reality tv producers, there are already cameras at various price points for those markets. Just because people have been trying to use dslr's for jobs better served by real video cameras doesn't mean the AF-100 can fill all of these shoes. If they had implemented a sensor crop like on the gh-2, then a long servo zoom that only covered the crop chip could have been produced for regular video work, and then change lenses and settings for creative work, but that isn't what has been done.
As yet there is no one camera to rule them all, pick one that best suits your needs, and if you are always in need of a different camera, you're probably better off renting.
The key is to at least produce a product that would appear to be a real movie, perhaps not a big blockbuster epic, but a small 70's drama is possible. Technology has been creeping closer for the past few years and I think with this camera in is here. Some may prefer to wait for whatever sony or canon my have in the offering at this price point, and to be honest, by the time my next project is ready to go there may be another contender as well, but if I was starting today, this would be it.
Concerns over whether it would be universally accepted for broadcast, should not be the first consideration for an artistically inclined production. Super16 is not considered to be HD by most of the big broadcasters, but it did not stop the production of best picture contenders 2 years in a row from using it.
Also consider that most of the cameras that are regularly discussed here, that any of us can realistically afford, are also not rated as approved as unlimited A-camera for HDTV. The pinnacle of affordable access to tv came with mini-dv. The DVX-100 or sony pd-150/170 were regularly accepted for broadcast, for reality type programming on MTV and other small networks, but on stepping up to HD most networks want a noticeably superior product. Something that small chips and long gop codecs can't achieve. I'm sure in a few years when all the channels are all hd all the time, standards will be lowered again for low end stuff. If a channel is going to finance your show, you have to deliver their standard no matter what camera you have or want to use.
So you have to go back to what you want to use it for. The AF-100 is marketed as an affordable digital cinema camera, it is not marketed to wedding videographers, as is the dvc-80, It is not marketed to news organizations or reality tv producers, there are already cameras at various price points for those markets. Just because people have been trying to use dslr's for jobs better served by real video cameras doesn't mean the AF-100 can fill all of these shoes. If they had implemented a sensor crop like on the gh-2, then a long servo zoom that only covered the crop chip could have been produced for regular video work, and then change lenses and settings for creative work, but that isn't what has been done.
As yet there is no one camera to rule them all, pick one that best suits your needs, and if you are always in need of a different camera, you're probably better off renting.