Video camera

[snowman]

You all were such great helps last year when it came to picking out a new digital camera (I choose the Canon SI-3 and love it). I'm hoping for similar help for a camcorder. I'm not even sure what questions to ask or what to look for in a camera.

So - do you have a recommendation? A favorite site for information and comparisions? Did you buy a horrible mistake?

Please help...I only have 10 months before our next trip.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

www.camcorderinfo.com is the site I used most heavily when I was looking.

Some big questions you need to answer for yourself include:

1) High definition or standard definition?
2) Tape, memory cards, or mini-DVDs, or hard drives?
3) Will I edit the footage or show it as-is?
4) How important is size?
5) Will I generally just shoot in full auto or will I use manual controls?
6) How wide do I need to go and how zoomed in do I need to go?
7) How important is low light performance?

For me personally, I couldn't see getting a non-high definition camcorder unless I expected to shoot most of my stuff in low light or was just getting it for posting clips on YouTube. You may be perfectly happy watching standard def home video and not want to pay the premium prices for HD camcorders. There are dozens of great camcorders out there, but they serve dozens of purposes.

 

[3ForDisney]

Last summer I purchased the Canon HV20 for $900 but now you can get it for a little over $600. This is a great little High Def camera. The image quality is great. My daughter is a catcher on a travel fastpitch softball team and I wanted to make a DVD for the team. Over the summer I took 18 hours of video. I used Sony Vegas to produce the final 30 min video with plays from each tournament. One thing that is nice, being a hidef recorder is you can shoot the video zoomed out, then in post processing, zoom in, crop what you want and still have a quality image. The camcorder uses the minidv 1 hour tapes which I prefer over an internal hard drive. The only down side to the camera is if you use the LCD often, the battery life is cut in half. I ended up ordering 3 extras. Luckly they aren't that big or heavy.

 

[dburg30]

I my HV20 also. I've heard that the new thing will just be large memory card units and the tape may be going away sometime. Not sure how much of that is true. I do love my mini-dv, but have to admit, it sucks only being able to capture into the computer at real time.

 

[3ForDisney]

I'm not sure I understand. What do you mean "capture into the computer at real time"? Are you talking about getting the video from the tape to disk?

 

[dburg30]

I'm not sure I understand. What do you mean "capture into the computer at real time"? Are you talking about getting the video from the tape to disk?

yep.. to be able to edit it and stuff..

 

[3ForDisney]

I use a little program "HDVSplit" to dump the tape to disk. It is a freeware program. What is nice is it is a small fast program that doesn't have a lot of overhead like the capture feature in a Sony Vegas package. This I find results in zero dropped frames during the capture. You can also configure it to create a separate file for each video segment on the tape.

 

[rtphokie]

You all were such great helps last year when it came to picking out a new digital camera (I choose the Canon SI-3 and love it). I'm hoping for similar help for a camcorder. I'm not even sure what questions to ask or what to look for in a camera.

So - do you have a recommendation? A favorite site for information and comparisions? Did you buy a horrible mistake?

Please help...I only have 10 months before our next trip.

If you want something with good quality and a real bargain, woot.com has a Canon ZR830 MiniDV Camcorder with 35x Optical Zoom for $130 + $5 shipping today.

I've got one of the older ZR series and it just runs and runs. Add a firewire card to your computer and you can bring in videos digitally and edit to your hearts content.

 

[dburg30]

I use a little program "HDVSplit" to dump the tape to disk. It is a freeware program. What is nice is it is a small fast program that doesn't have a lot of overhead like the capture feature in a Sony Vegas package. This I find results in zero dropped frames during the capture. You can also configure it to create a separate file for each video segment on the tape.

What do you mean by fast? It dumps the tape to disk faster then 1:1?

 

[Tink10]

If you want something with good quality and a real bargain, woot.com has a Canon ZR830 MiniDV Camcorder with 35x Optical Zoom for $130 + $5 shipping today.

I've got one of the older ZR series and it just runs and runs. Add a firewire card to your computer and you can bring in videos digitally and edit to your hearts content.

Today's woot was a good one.

 

[garate55]

You didn't specify a price range, but if your looking for something in this range this is a nice camera. I thought about this one when looking. I ultimately went with the Sony HDR HC3. I like it for what it is, but look out for Sony products as you will likely be stuck buying all Sony add ons.

Check out this review for Canon XH A1.