What is a good full HD video camera?
Question by Liam Miller: What is a good full HD video camera?
I am 16 and very interested in movies, film making, film editing and directing. I am in my schools Film and TV class and we have done some shooting before on standard definition camcorders but i want to know what camera i can buy that will do me good. It is going to be used mainly for making short videos, videos for competitions and school assignments but i dont want them to look amateur. The camera has to be able to shoot full 1080p HD video and the cost can be as high as $ 2000 dollars. I know this seems a little high for my age and experience but i want this camera to last a quite a while and i do plan on using it alot. Also it needs a thread for wide angle lenses and auto/manual focus wouldn’t hurt. Please help.
Best answer:
Answer by Palladini
Quickly, HD is a marketing term. If they told you this is a highly compressed format that is a step backward from good old MiniDv and developed because most consumers can’t (or don’t care to) understand the tape format and editing.
A $ 2000 HD camera will record 11 gigs of data per hour. Little old 720 X 480 MiniDv gets 13 gigs/hour. That is 15% More data for 1/6th the frame size.
What is even more important for you, however, is how the HD creates a crappy picture. HD relies on reference frames, as few as 2 each second. The remaining 28 frames record only a predetermined level of change, and “interpolate” (mathematically guess) the differences between frames. Disaster for action sports.
MiniDv formats are uncompressed in the brightness channel, and have low compression in the less important color channel. The little compression is “inter-frame”. No frame relies on its neighbor for image data.
The end result is you can take footage from a MiniDv camera and up-convert it to 1920 x 1080 and still have a better image quality that footage shot in HD.
You can get a new Canon ZR960 for $ 250. You will need a few tapes and a firewire cable.
Otherwise, look at the used market. You should easily be able to find a used Z or elura series. I’d be skeptical of a GL-1 going that cheap, but you never know. I’ve known a lot of people that got a GL for a single trip or wedding.
Anyway, look into the format. At $ 2000 with a HD camcorder you likely will max out at 4-5 gigs/hour, which is really shooting yourself in the foot for quality.
You would need to add about $ 1500 to get a clear quality advantage over standard def, MiniDv.
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