[Camcorder Advice] Good mid-range cam?

B

bonafide

Veteran X
Any TW film or camcorder people, I need some help.

I'm looking for a good mid-range priced camcorder ($500-$1500). I'd like to use it for filming shorts, most likely to be distributed on DVD or internet.

I'm thinking that miniDV would be the best recording format for me, and Firewire/USB transfer to the computer would be nice.

I didn't plan on getting a separate boom mic setup at this point, so 1/2-way decent sound recording would be nice. To me, quality of picture would probably be the most important point.

Help me o' TW gods of geek advice.
 
I'm happy with my Sony DCR-HC32. Whatever current comparable model is out should make you happy.
 
hey, when you download it to the PC in AVI, what do you guys recommend for encoding? I edit the whole movie then save it still in AVI form. Then I'd like to store my movies, but still be able to edit it or use parts of it at a later date depending on what I'm working on. I'm only doing home movies right now using a Sony DCR-38.
 
Extermn8r said:
hey, when you download it to the PC in AVI, what do you guys recommend for encoding? I edit the whole movie then save it still in AVI form. Then I'd like to store my movies, but still be able to edit it or use parts of it at a later date depending on what I'm working on. I'm only doing home movies right now using a Sony DCR-38.
Click to expand...

well I dont download it onto the pc, i record it with premiere or final cut directly into the editor, and then save it in whatever format suits me

thats usually wmv (youtube) but if I want HQ and short encode times I usually go with mpeg-2
 
Extermn8r said:
hey, when you download it to the PC in AVI, what do you guys recommend for encoding? I edit the whole movie then save it still in AVI form. Then I'd like to store my movies, but still be able to edit it or use parts of it at a later date depending on what I'm working on. I'm only doing home movies right now using a Sony DCR-38.
Click to expand...

I export the movie back out to MiniDV as a hard copy as well as keeping the original tapes. With Avid and probably final cut, when you capture the computer remembers timecode on the tape so at any time you can recapture the original material and start the project from where you left off.

If I'm encoding for web, small personal copies I use a quicktime compression, works very well. If it's for DVD you have to use MPEG.

:sunny:
 
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