looking to pick up a camcorder for misc stuff. don’t know if i should go with the miniDV or the HDD type? any suggestions would be great!
i will probably get a setup to mount the camera to my bike so i can video while riding. also my wife needs one for some school project she has to do. other than that, just going to use it to make some vids to post up on the forums and probably some of me and the local boys street racing.
i guess i don’t really understand what the advantages and disadvantages are of using the minidv tapes or going with the built in hdd
my biggest concern is video quality and i can spend 1000 or less. also ease of transferring the video to the computer is important.
i went internal drive beacuse minidvd is pointless… screw having a physical medium if you intend on using it online / on a computer anyway.
ccd3 and a good optical zoom is what i watched for… i have a jvc (not the best brand, but i gave them a shot) with only a 4gig internal drive and an extra 1 gig SD card for under 400 bucks. mine is a mini though… and it’s hard to hold still… it’s about the same length and width of a wallet so you can imagine trying to zoom and get steady shots…
its’ like an hour or an hour and fifteen minutes at full native DVD quality… if you scale it back its’ like 4 hours… the video quality is great though…
the big time camcorders have 20+GB drives… i knew my camera is just to have around to record a minute or two of random crap, vs. wanting to record a kids football game or something similar.
keep in mind that my camera is a handheld… they scale back everything to make it small.
I have a DV camera and it works great for what I use it for. I would love to have a HD camera, but I can’t justify the cost for the camera. Also think about what you are going to be doing with the video. If you are looking to make video for the web you are going to cut the quality down to save of size. So no point going and getting a HD camera. Then editing with HD takes much more expensive software to make it look good.
i would say dv to start… maybe move to HD if you really stay on the video production
i have a miniDV camcorder… it was like 400 a year ago. its down to about 300 now. its an awesome camcorder and quality is way higher then anything you will ever need. hooked up to my 32" tv its perfect… so on a comp screen its way better then anything you can think of. its a sony miniDV camcorder and also takes some low res pictures. it doesnt cost alot to get a nice camcorder nowadays
I have a Hitachi camcorder that records right on to mini dvds. i hate it. I cannot get anything off of the dvd onto the computer. I will probably just end up buying en external dvd drive to do this.
you mean what i suggested in the first post??? imagine that
and to the guys with teh minidv crap… you can use a USB device called a dazzler that they sell at best lie and stores like that to play the movie on the camera and to rip into windows… it sucks, but that’s the ‘easiest’ method for the average person
