Video camera recommendations [Modest Budget]

urbansurgeonurbansurgeon
edited July 2008 in advice
I want to buy a vid camera - max £350 say

i know next to nothing other than my brother's recommendation that a HD based camera is best. he doesnt own one and has never used one so i take the advice with afistfull of salt, but any ideas

typically we are talking not much more than home movies, but venturing into video sketching and potentialy rigging up for animations at some point. (though might stick to the stills route for that)

Comments

  • mondomondo
    edited 1:39AM
    When we realised we needed something with which to shoot our offspring we bought a Canon HV20...it's been pretty good so far; gives a vaguely "cinematic" look if you set it up a certain way and then forget about it. I think chris may have found this model lacking when he was looking for an HD camera to shoot stuff off the roof of a moving car at night (or something!), but it's been fine for more sedate fare. My main gripe is with the price of HD cassettes (about four times as much as regular ones)...maybe a disk- or DVD-based one would be worth looking at if the budget extends that far.
  • BiffBiff
    edited 1:39AM
    HD is good. You increase the bandwidth (and processing time) required to edit it, though.

    At this point in the market and industry, it's about a wash.
  • mondomondo
    edited 1:39AM
    uh, yes, what Biff said, too...I forgot about the space issue as I've mostly just been leaving footage on the tapes and stockpiling them until I can be amazed at all the things that used to happen -- but the items I've transferred to play with are well over a gigabyte per minute, even with whatever compression it uses to squeeze the data onto a mini DV tape.
  • chrischris
    edited 1:39AM
    yeah, i'd go for a disk based recorder, i think. also make sure that the format it output in is easily imported in imove/fcp etc. there are "standards" around which aren't entirely standard, still. avchd, i'm looking at you.
  • chrischris
    edited July 2008
    go progressive, if the budget allows (not really looked into this stuff for a while now).

    edit// though, i guess that interlaced may be better for high speed stuff... minefield, eh?
  • urbansurgeonurbansurgeon
    edited 1:39AM
    ~wooshes hand over head action
  • BiffBiff
    edited 1:39AM
    Long story short - progressive means every line of display (the 720, 1080 number) is refreshed every second. The i means every other line is refreshed every second.

    There are advantages to both, but to my understanding P>I
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