I've had the X70 for nearly a month now and I've been putting it through the paces. I've shot an interview, a live rock band in a basement, a wedding, a festival, and now a boat cruise. I can say with certainty that the built in image stabilization on the Sony X70 works. Really works. The boat was rocking so much at times that it was difficult to stand, but you would hardly be able to tell from the footage. No, it's not rock solid, but considering the conditions, it would have been nearly impossible to shoot this entire video hand held without the stabilization.
I'm new to XDCAMs and proper video cameras in general, but I'm constantly tinkering with the gamma, knee, and color profiles to find the best performance settings for the X70. I tend to expose to the left when shooting in daylight, and my subjects tend to look underexposed as a result. The good news is that the X70 handles shadows and midtones so well that even these underexposed images look rich and textured.
I use Davinci Resolve Lite to ingest the XAVC-L files because it's free, and incredibly easy to use. It's icing on the cake to know that I can edit in the program too, but I've found that Davinci relies heavily on GPU, and my current station does not have anything worth mentioning in that area. But grading the footage has yielded great results so far, and I say that knowing how utterly ignorant I am to the whole process of color grading. I'm pulling at straws and still finding something good looking in the footage. I know there is more, much more, to be coaxed from the X70's sensor, the picture profiles and Resolve Lite.
P.S.
S&Q Motion is very fun to play with.
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