Originally Posted by knowyouremeny Ok, I'm willing to spend up to around $2,000, and I'm wondering what exactly I should be looking for.
Do HD cameras produce better quality films? or is it so slight that you don't even notice it? |
Not sure you'll get an HD camera for that sort of money. The term you're probably most likely looking for is HDV. I beleive it is beter, yes. As for quality od delivered article. Difficult to say because in order to (at the moment) put it onto a DVD for viewing, your footage needs to be converted back to standard defintion, losing quality.
Originally Posted by knowyouremeny Should I get a microphone that's seperate from the one on the camera? If so, how do I link them up? Is there a port on the camera that will take input from a mic and synch it up with the video? How many of these ports are there? For example, can I hook up two small microphones that can be pinned to shirts as well as having an "area mic" (no clue what those are actually called)... or do I have to plug those into some sort of hub that joins all of the signals prior to using them as input into the camera? |
If you're serious then I would suggest getting an external mic or two, yes. the trick here though is that decent external mic (and I don't mean to slag off any that don't fit this description) tend to connect using an XLR lead rather than a jack plug. You will need tohunt carefully for a camera in your price range that will accept balanced XLR inputs though. You can get converters to convert XLR to jack plug but this is more expence.
Is your $2000 budget for everything or just for camera? Clip on lavelier mics which tend to be radio are not cheap.
Consumer camcorders will tend to have a single jack socket for audi-in purposes so mixing channels would need an external piece of kit. Not my area of expertise but these are available. I have a Sony HDR-FX1E, very much up into the Pro-sumer level of camcorder and that only has a single jack socket for audio in.
I think what I'm getting at is that you will do very well to get everything you have described for the money you quoted.
One thing to think about though is to not record the audio to your camera at all. but tobuy a seperate multi channel audio recorder. Again this tend to be 'pro' kit though and does not come in cheap. I'm thinking of something like
http://www.dolphinmusic.co.uk/page/s...roduct_id/4632 or
http://www.dolphinmusic.co.uk/page/s...roduct_id/5836 for audio capture. These two examples are very much at the bottom end of the scale, and both will accept two channel input. They record to memory card so transfer to PC is easy and copying files. and you just need to sync up the audio in your editing application. This is easy to do.