James Mather
Director of Photography
Los Angeles, CA
www.migrantfilmworkers.com
LIST: $8,999 (street: $4,500′ $6,500)
WHY I LOVE IT: No one owner/operator can afford to have every format and piece of equipment that might be requested. But the Canon XL H1 goes a long way in helping me meet my needs with just one camera.
With the XL H1 I can record HD-SDI, 1080i, 24 frame, 30 frame and 60i. I can shoot in 16:9 or 4:3. I can also record in HDV and downconvert it right out of the camera as standard DV. This is helpful when I want the extra archival value of shooting in HD, even though I may not need HD at the moment.

Recently, I was assigned to shoot an underwater documentary in Southeast Asia. A heavier camera would have been much harder to manage, especially in the small planes we used to reach this remote area.

Underwater photography requires you to insert weights into your housing to achieve neutral buoyancy. The larger the camera, the larger the housing, and the more air there is. A full-size camera starts off being heavier, but also requires a lot of additional weight to achieve neutral buoyancy. With battery and support gear, the fully loaded housing could weigh close to 100 pounds.

But on this shoot, the combined total of the Gates housing and buoyancy compensating weights amounted to only about 35 pounds. The one-hour HDV tapes also kept reloads to a minimum. We would’ve been in bad shape if we hadn’t used the XL H1.