HF-10 used in filming "Crank 2: High Voltage"

Fifteen Vixias (HF-10) and five XH-A1s were used for filming of "Crank High Voltage". The story about the way they used them is quite fascinating and goes to tell how the sub- $1,000 consumer camcorders have matured to the point of providing quite respectable results.

Article here:

http://dmnnewswire.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=715853-0

Yup. The HF10/100 deliver amazing range and detail, and quite astounding low-light performance, as long as you don't use the default settings.
Just put them in Cinema mode, and use the Neutral "image effect". This is probably the combination of parameters which captures the biggest amount of information - no blown highlights, no detail-less blacks, no saturated colors when the subject is not that saturated. It will keep seeing details when other combination of parameters will saturate or clip.

Then you can tweak it in post if you don't like it. Re-encoding is not such an awful idea with these cameras anyway, 8GB / 1 hr indicates the default codec uses pretty weak compression. With x264 at max quality you can probably reduce the size 4x, maybe 5x, with no perceivable quality loss, so yeah, go ahead and post-process it if you must, it's okay.

In any case, that's how I shoot all the time. Looks like a freakin' pro camera - well, okay, it stumbles if you push it too hard, while a true high-end would keep going, but hey, for the money I'm not complaining.

For the movie, they also used the 24p setting, which is mandatory for cinema, but perhaps not a good idea for home video.

For the movie, they also used the 24p setting, which is mandatory for cinema, but perhaps not a good idea for home video.

If you plan on staying in HD forever, 24p isn't all that bad, as it improves just a bit on the low-light performance.

When editing the 24p content (encoded in that annoying 60i telecine), I transcode the stuff into ProRes and inverse telecine to discard unnecessary fields/frames. I edit in 24p timeline and deliver, most often, in AVCHD blu-ray flavour, on ordinary DVD-DLs, since blank blu-ray discs are just way too expensive these days.