I'm commited to producing my own video clips to sell on the web. I'll be selling to strangers so what I produce needs to be of reasonable quality. I know i should buy the 1,100 - 1,900 hold on your shoulder video camera, but its out of budget and i need two. Once I make some money ill move up to these. What im looking for is to purchase 2 camcords to record office "role play" scenerios for trainings. Priced between 500-600 per camera. My technical issues are... 1. low light. I will be renting external lights but if the low light performance is good enough I may not have to or use good house lightinng. 2. close quarters...eaasy handling and good stabilization (definatly using tripods, but stabilization helps) 3. zooming in to show facial expressions 4. I want commercial grade video quality or just under that. 5. superior audio (surround)...do I need to use external mics in a quite offiice setting. I would like to record on a medum I can easily edit on my laptop, turn into downloadable files...not sure what kind or if I should make them real player or WMP friendly, and encode. What's encoding? can you suggest me a good video editing program under 300 dollars? Do I even need to spend that much? I appreacte any help or advice you can give me. This is my first time doing somehing on my own, and I don’t want to make any unnecessary mistakes. Thanks Kris
I'm not too experience with digicams but if you're going to record in a slow-paced office setting you really should consider buying at least one tripod. If you use both cameras off the shoulder or just plain hand-held your work, no matter how good the picture quality, will look amateurish. A nice steady camera angle will produce an excellent result. If you buy tripods for both cameras it will be much easier for you to film facial close-up action of people talking. If you only have one tripod, you'll have to film all of one side of a conversation, stop, reset the shot and then film the other person reciting the same conversation. This will put the onus on the actors / participants. If you're filming training material it would be best to put the onus on YOU rather than the average office-monkey
First off, you aren't going to find something that does really well in low light for 500 to 600. I suggest lighting of some kind. Could be a table lamp or whatever, just make the area as light as possible. Note that this is good practice anyway. If you have any control over the environment, light it as well as you can. 2. Most MiniDV cameras are going to be the same in terms of size. Stabilization varies only slightly. 3. Most MiniDV zooms are up near 10x. That should be plenty to get a facial expression, especially if you are talking close quarters like you said in 2. 4. You're not getting commercial grade video at $600, but the best I can suggest to you at that Range is probably the Panasonic pv-gs150. It's a 3ccd model that if you look around, you can find it under $600. 5. As far as surround sound... I wouldn't exactly say that surround sound will give you great quality. Surround sound just gives you 6 channels, versus the 2 in stereo. But 6 channels of bad sound is just as bad as 2. I would recommend concentrating more on getting a quality shotgun mike than surround sound. Especially if you're just picking up dialog, surround sound is unnecessary. As far as the editing program, if you're on windows, you might be able to get by with basic editing on windows movie maker. Adobe Premiere Elements is pretty nice too for $100. On a mac, I would say go with iMovie.
