What is the best video camera for making home made movies?
Question by Answermaster101: What is the best video camera for making home made movies?
Best answer:
Answer by Phaedrus
If you want to edit your movies on a computer, then you want a digital video camera, with a IEEE 1394 (also known as firewire or i.link) connection. Macs will connect to this directly, while most PCs still won’t, and you’ll require an adapter card. Once the video is imported to your computer, you can cut out the bad shots, rearrange, add titles and music, special effects, etc. You can also mix in imported still images from a digital camera. If your computer is less than a few years old, it should be able to handle it. Both Macs and PCs come with digital video editing software. When you are done editing, you can write the video back out to your camera, or burn a dvd if you have a DVD RW drive. Note that video takes up an enormous amount of hard drive space. Something like 1GB for every 5 minutes of video.
There are three main types of digital video cameras, minidv tapes, DVD, and hard drive based. The minidv tapes store the video in the least compressed form, the other types lose some video quality by compressing the video more aggressively at recording time.
Good digitial video cameras are made by Canon, Sony, and Panasonic. JVC and Samsung also make video cameras, but I don’t have any personal experience with their products.
Prices start at around $ 300, and go up from there.
If you want high definition video, your options are more limited. Canon and Sony each have a high definition camera available in the $ 1200 range. Of course, at this point, you’d be hard-pressed to do anything with the edited video except send it back out to the camera to view on a high definition TV. Eventually it will be possible to burn high definition DVDs.
Add your own answer in the comments!
