Tripod Productions LLC

What Video Camera Should I Get?

Hello folks. I’ve never had a video (camcorder) camera before. now I’m trying to make a short film and I need a good one. but my budget is a little low I suppose, I’ve saved about 1000$ for the camera. I don’t have any information about camcorders and video cameras. I don’t know what DV means, I don’t know what’s CDD and as a matter of fact I know nothing about these things. all I know is what’s pixel and what’s HD. I need camera which can save the films on its memory (or a external memory card). I don’t want to save on cassettes or mini-dvds. and I want to to film in a regular format. AVI or Mp4 I suppose. can you tell me about the variety of video cameras out there and explain some of the basic terms and words in this field and then suggest a camera?

Hi Karen,

First of all you don’t really need to know all technical terms to make fine movie. Your camera is
just a tool.
For $ 1000 you can buy a really good Full HD (High Definition) camera. It’s called Full HD because
it records movies with a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels (= 2073600 pixels or 2 Mega-pixel).
The modern camcorder records it’s images on a SD (Secure Digital) memory card. At the moment
you can store up to 64 Gb on a SDHC (High Capacity) card. In good quality you can record 1 hour
on 4 Gb.
You can Always connect your camera to a tv and watch your movie. To fully enjoy the quality of
your camera you need a Full HD tv as well. The connection from camcorder to HD tv is called:
HDMI. Note that this HDMI cable is seldom included when you buy a camera, so ask for one.
When you like to burn your movie , you have to keep two things in mind.
First you need a Blu-ray burner to enjoy Full HD quality. You can also burn it to DVD but then
the quality will decrease. Also you need to convert your movie to another format. DVD needs
Mpeg2 files. Sometimes software to do so is provided with your camera but in fact you need a
video-editing program to do it right. Every brand uses a different format.
The CCD is the sensor which the camera uses record the images and make them digital.
Most camera’s have one CCD for the three co lours all images are build with: red-green-blue.
Some,more expensive,camera’s uses three CCD’s. Then every colour has it’s own CCD.
This increases the image-quality.
The quality of the lens is maybe the most important part of the camera. In the more expensive
models different brands uses different lenses, p.e. Sony uses Carl Zeiss, JVC uses Konica-Minolta
and Samsung uses Schneider-Kreuznag. All high quality lenses.
Another function that needs attention is Vibration Reduction. It’s your electronic tripod.

Enough with the tech-babble now. Much more important is that you learn to film well. It’s more
difficult than taking photo’s but with some practice and a good video-editng program you can
be a real ”Steven Spielberg”.

Personally, I’m a big JVC fan. They make very good and affordable camera’s. To edit I use
Cyberlink Power Director.
As long as you stick to the “A” brands, they all make descent Full HD camera’s.
If I may make a suggestion: http://camcorder.jvc.com/product.jsp?modelId=MODL028615&pathId=171&page=10

I hope this is usefull for you and wish you all the best.
Kind regards,
Lance

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