Experiences with Panasonic PV-GS400?

[stantheman1976]

My church is looking at investing in a good video camera early next year and I'm leaning towards this camera. It would mostly be used for outdoor events and indoor gatherings and sermons. I'm particularly curious about the sound input. We want to record sermons with the soundboard patched into the camera, but I'm not sure how well the audio input works on this one since it's a shared plug.

So if any of you guys happen to have used this one, or even have suggestions on an equal model of another brand can you give me some advice?

Thanks.

[slacker]

Check out camcordeinfo.com. They have a great review on the Panasonic GS400.

[stantheman1976]

Yea, that's where I got my info from and decided that one might be what we get. I was just hoping for some real life experiences.

[Georg Liigand]

I have the GS400 and it's simply an amazing camera. If you want to use an extra shotgun microphone attached to the camera's shoe, then you can nicely plug the miniplug to the camera and adjust the audio levels via LCD menus. However, I want to go now more professional with audio and I should be receiving a Rode VideoMic and Beachtek DXA-2S XLR audio adapter very soon. Then it will be a pretty nice setup I think, because I can have the gain levels on the LCD while I can adjust the sound smoothly with the knobs which the adapter has.

Regarding to the picture quality, you can't go wrong when buying it. In daytime conditions, you can get pretty much professional broadcast results and doing some white balance correction in Premiere Pro will add even better look (deep colours which remind cinema picture). I have pretty many clips online which I've filmed with that camera and will have a new one coming very soon. I've also produced many DVDs for selling and have got amazing feedback from the watchers about the quality.

Here are some sample clips:
http://www.ibiblio.org/flight/georg/viljandiralli.wmv
http://www.ibiblio.org/flight/georg/little_fellas.wmv (a bit tuned in post)
http://www.ibiblio.org/flight/georg/copterline110805.wmv

And my current camera setup:



The only thing with this camera is that it's pretty small and therefore you need to practice a lot to get decent results when handfilming.

[Steve Stepoway]

Also take a look at pana3ccduser.com. Lots of discussion about the GS-400, and it's smaller brother the GS-250, which might be worth taking a look at. I use my 250 for shooting a lot of stuff around my church, and it also is quite amazing.

[stantheman1976]

Awesome. Thanks for the feedback. If the budget committee will go for it I think this is the one I'm gonna recommed.