My first shots with XH-A1

R

re_curly81

Active member
I spent an afternoon in Prince Edward County (Ontario, Canada) testing out my new XH-A1....well, not new, I bought it off kijiji for $3000(Can) with case and battery. Its was mint, with only a few hours. Settings were -3dB gain, ASG off, Preset downloaded called 'TRUCOLOR' which to my eyes, looks the best.

http://vimeo.com/6014084

For those looking to buy this camera, you will not regret it, assuming its setup right. On the negative side, the controls are a little backwards. For instance, the iris wheel feels inverted. I'm used to a DVX100 where scrolling 'up' (clockwise) turns up the brightness, but its the opposite, like in a SLR camera I guess. Any way to change this? The DVX is a little more intiutive, its like 'here's the dial, here's the button to turn it off'. The XH-A1 is not like that.
 
Excellent images, beautiful colors, great clarity. The A1 still holds up as one of the top cameras despite the fact that the design is several years old. (I've done more than one shoot out with it and even in the blind shoot outs it's rated near the top.)

The people that complain about it just don't know about the AGC and the presets. TrueColor, VividRGB, bleachbypass and Panalook2 are all favorites of mine.

Even if I buy an A1 or Scarlet I'll keep my A1.

Great job.
 
Beautiful camera handling. I was thinking that even though the images looked neutral, they could have more contrast. Maybe it was the Vimeo but I felt the contrast could have been increased a bit. Think so? Have you tried the Panavision preset..That one is nice as well. I enjoy using my A-1 also.
 
I was intending to keep the colors as accurate as possible. Vimeo is full of people cranking the contrast and saturation thinking it looks better. I just wanted to show how the camera can really pull out the texture in colors.
My exposure technique was 'keep it just under 95% zebra', so the blacks are kinda grey, but I wanted to show that there is information in the blacks to play with in post....something I'm not used to with my old Sony HC-1!
 
Also, exporting from ProRes to h.264 just killed everything! texture, gradients, resolution, everything. I will try and replace upload a higher bitrate 1080p version, and if you have a vimeo account, you can download the original.
 
okay! you can now download the 1080p 12megabit version on vimeo. Its pretty close to the original, but for those who are not familiar with this camera, there absolutely no visible compression in the orginal, and the de-interlacing on export is not very good. (jaggies)

http://www.vimeo.com/6014084
 
you know you can change the iris ring direction right?

go into the menu, go to customize, go to custom function. then, select whatever custom function file you want to modify, probably CFn1. then, scroll over to tune, select that, and go over to 05, which is rings direction. select that, and to just change the direction of the iris, go down to 04.

anyways, that's some great looking stuff. i especially liked the shot of the peppers.
 
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