hi i am new to the forum. I am in the market to get a nice camcorder for recording fishing and hunting trips and doing a lot of editing. My price range is under 4000$. If some of you all don't mind would you point me in the right direction. i also will need something with a good zoom and low level lighting b/c a lot of the shots will be early in the morning or later in the evening. thanks for your time

If you want to do editing then I would suggest mini dv, but do you want to have lots of tapes lying about and always have to remember to stock up on them before you leave? If you don't want to do that then maybe a hard disk camcorder might be better, you can use it right up until the internal hard disk is full and then you need to transfer the video to a laptop to free up more space.

Hard disk camcorders and mini dvd camcorders usually don't have as high picture quality as mini dv, so if best picture quality is important to you then again maybe mini dv is where you should be looking. I don't think you need to blow the entire 4 Gees on a camcorder just to record your hunting and fishing trips, what do you intend doing with the videos after you have edited them? Unless you are getting into making corporate videos, wedding videos or putting stuff on tv then thinking about spending 4000 dollars is way over the top.

You could purchase a hi def camcorder like a Canon HV-20, a good spec computer to capture and edit on and some accessories like a tripod, carrying bag, light, external microphone etc. And probably still have change left out of 4000.

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Well thanks for the reply. Yes i would like to make videos to put on seminars and also try to put on t.v. So is the camcorder you suggested in that quality. Also are there many different lenses i could get for different situations or is one lens a do it all. Is after effects a good editing program for that camcorder, or do you not recommend that program. thanks again Ryan

Video for seminars and local tv stations would look fine using a Canon HV-20 (just make sure they can take the files from your camcorder first), but if you want to send it off to the major networks then a 3CCD shoulder mounted JVC or Sony would be worth looking at. Are you planning on becoming a freelance tv camera person? After Effects is for the creation of special effects and is not regarded as an editing program as such. You need either Adobe Premiere or Sony Vegas or one of the other NLE's to edit video and audio first and then you would use AE to add more sophisticated effects to the video. As far as I know those 3CCD shoulder mounted camcorders, sometimes called ENG cameras (Electronic News Gathering) have interchangeable lens, but I will let the pro operators on here give you more details about them.

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