Video camera guru's please help! My wife is a stand-up comedian just starting out. We want to buy a camcorder to record her gigs (in fairly low-lit club and bar environments) and then edit some of the footage together to form a press-pack DVD for her. The stages in these clubs are usually lit warmly but the camcorder itself would sit on a table or tripod about 15-20 feet away in the darkness of the audience. We don't need any bells, whistles or fancy modes. We're looking for a model that's simple and inexpensive but isn't *too* grainy in low light, has a reasonable zoom, a reasonable uni-directional mic, and records to a format that's straightforward to get into an editing software like Adobe Premiere or Ulead Videostudio. Thanks for your help! (P.s. ideally our budget is on the low end $300-$350.)
I'm looking for a cam that works in low light as well I'll mostly be using this at the racetrack most events are at night It needs to be able to have a smooth good optical zoom Record well in low light Image stabilization is of course important At first I was considering a Mini DV Ive heard the Aiptek HD pro's are great for the $$ (around $200) and they are HD cameras, the video seems great but I haven't heard anything about Image stabilization night shots are said to be fine from 5-8 feet away with the LED lights though I'm not sure how it will do at the track Perhaps that may even be a decent choice for PerCapita Its by no means a pro camera but said to be better quality than similar priced mini DV cams and with a nice sized flash card you will never need to buy tapes specs from aiptek http://www.aiptek.com/hdcamcorders/ walmart has them for $170 shipped and though it supports 32GB SD cards I would get a very high speed 16GB no less than class 6 new egg has some 16gb SDHC class 6 cards between $35 and $40ish and they have a SanDisk Extreme III with Up to 30MB/ sec sequential read/write but thats a hefty $130 still the total with the camera is about the same as most mini DVs though don't take my word on the camera google some reviews of the HDV21X camera
