Nice 1080p Camera for Movie Making? That’s not a Flip Video?
Question by Tyler: Nice 1080p Camera for Movie Making? That’s not a Flip Video?
I need a nice 1080p camera that’s good in the dark as well as in day time, I’m aiming to make a low budget sort of movie and I need a nice camera to make it nice. I don’t prefer a Flip Video camera, I’d like a hand camera. My price range is around 50-180$ at most 200. Thanks for helping!
Best answer:
Answer by Palladini
MiniDV tape based cameras are what you need. Can be bought for under $ 400 visit http://www.usa.canon.com/cusa/support/consumer/camcorders/minidv_camcorders/zr800#Features for information on one of them. Now read the rest and see why HD is no good.
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.
An interesting note, most of the DSLRs on the market that shoot video, shoot full 1080 at 20 gigs/hour, pretty good, but likely more than you care to spend, and they do have their own issues.
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 $ 200 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 $ 3100 to get a clear quality advantage over standard def, MiniDv.
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