I've never been much of a one for using in camera video. When I had my G9 I used it a bit just to see what it could do, and had great fun and some pleasing results with it. The file sizes always seemed reasonable so I was happy with the outcomes. The Mac has built in movie progs, which were a revelation to me. However, I am now using the Canon 5DMkII with great success, I love what its capable of, both in low light and regular photo output.

I was recently asked to give the movie mode a go on a job I was doing. It was essentially just a 360 degree sequence. The camera was on a tripod and slowly moved round in a complete circle. The result was impressive, 1.42min at a resolution of 1920x1080. The file size however was 599MB which I was surprised at, but it made me realise just how much space you would need for creating anything with any length.

My 8GB CF card would last no time and the HD drive would soon get full. Even using DVDs to put resulting movies on would not take that many minutes, and blu ray would no doubt have to be considered.

I've not tried the Mac movie prog on it yet, there was really little need on this occasion, but I imagine there will be some way of compressing or reducing the size in some way. Out of interest though I'd be interested to know what sort of filesizes other people get for a 1080p movie sequence

In the past I have stitched 360 degree panoramas to create a Quicktime VR movie sequence, and I've used iPix camera systems which take 2 180 degree images which are stitched in iPix software. However, it seems to me that those days are maybe gone now and the movie mode in modern dSLR's does just as good if not a better job, without all the hassle, and of course it comes with sound and action if you want it.

I'm beginning to warm to the idea