Colourful Real Stories

I was called in to Roving to help grade and online a new comedy show called Real Stories, The show was great fun to work on and full of gags that were still funny 3 weeks into the edit. Most of my work was colour grading as I was quite late to the editing party. This was my first exposure working with the HDV footage. I have to say I was disappointed with what the Sony Z1 produces. Part of the issue was with workflow of shooting HDV the down-converting to DV over firewire. Having subsequently cut the HDV short 'John' I think it's better to stay HDV native until the last minute and then down convert. I found 'Real stories' hard to get enough chroma information to do secondary colour corrections (such as making everything in a shot but a red phone darker). The chroma sampling is so low there was very little latitude to move before things got 'crunchy'. I am currently cutting s short 'Grace' shot on the Panasonic HVX200 - now there's a cheap camera with a lot of chroma...