Michael did a good job of reviewing this camera.
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/camcorders/canon-xf300.shtmlEarly on I bought two and today things have changed and they sit on the shelf.
First the build quality is fragile. It's onboard Mike on both broke off and we pack carefully.
Second, the menu, switches, and combination of both must be learned from to back and you have to be carful when setting up. It takes menu and hard button functions to operate the camera successfully.
Be careful with the hard buttons as anywhere you put your hands you'll move one and moving any one of the side buttons can be a disaster.
Next there are small chips. for studio work, or if you don't want a lot of background separation this camera won't do it.
The biggest issue is it doesn't work in low light and doesn't like high gain. It will snowstorm in the blacks if you push it too hard.
The upside is the color is very good, it's a great interview camera, excellent sound recording, good approx. 10 stop of latitude file.
For sound sampling the small male jack for headphones is very, very fragile. Both of ours has pulled out and had to be fixed.
The imagery can be made film like with some expert transcoding and the files hold up well in mild colorgrading.
Autofocus is excellent as long as you use the supplemental autofocus thing besides the lens and you don't add a large mattebox to block it.
Outside you must, repeat this must, play around with shutter speed frame rate, to get the proper look. I did a walk and talk scene where the subject was walking through a woods. The color was stunning,
the highlights held, the sound through wired lavs was broadcast quality, but we had to redo the scene after we noticed strobing coming from the light bouncing through the trees. I think we lowered the shutter speed and taped on an ND filter.
It's a good camera, but I wouldn't consider it for professional use. We used it for that but bought two because I just couldn't trust something breaking.
Here it is mounted on a dolly with a riser and the old Letus extender, using an old nikon 50mm f 1.2 manual lens.
Personally the newer Sony FS100 is a better system. The FS100 doesn't have as robust a file, but goes much higher iso. The sony has better autofocus, is smaller and easier to work though the color is more challanged. You can make the fs100 look more like film easier, due to the sensor size.
Actually if I had to go this route (we now own three RED's) I'd go for the fs700 which isn't cheap. The fs700 is about 9 grand all kitted out, but offers more expandiblity with the future 4k raw module which is not out yet.
IMO
Bc
