Recommend me a Video Camera

[Stu R]

Evening chaps.

Right, I've got a new venture in the making, and part of that will involve capturing some video footage. It'll be of motorbikes, mainly on the road.

I'm not looking for seriously high quality, but something that can be used to create a fairly decent quality compilation video on DVD would be nice, though it's main uses will be for capturing footage which will be posted on our website, so something that you'd consider reasonable quality on youtube is the level we're looking at. It'll be used as a normal video camera I suppose, but I'd like something that can be mounted on a dashboard as well as used in the traditional handycam sense.

I know absolutely nothing about this sort of stuff in all honesty, but I'm assuming recording to SD card would be preferred for this sort of stuff as it might end up taking a couple of knocks / vibrations etc.

Budget wise, no idea, <500 quid would be nice but I won't complain if it's cheaper.

[CO2000]

Have a look at a Panasonic HDC-SD9 (or the older 5 if you want to save a few quid)

Co.

[Stu R]

Cheers for the reply.

Blimey, that seems like a hell of a lot of camera for the money!
Are panny the best of their ilk when it comes to this stuff?
I'd been looking at Sony previously.

[oobster]

Canon HF-100 seems to get good reviews. Should come in at just under £500 too.

http://fwd.five.tv/gadget-show/bestbuys/camcorders...

[bobthemonkey]

The HF-100 and SD9 are the two frontrunners in the category, As an aside, they both use the AVCHD codec, which isn't the easiest thing in the world to edit, and takes a decent amount of processing power, especially if you use a workflow where you have to transcode the video to another format.

The HF-100 will give you a better image in low light conditions as it uses one large sensor, as opposed to three smaller sensors.

[Stu R]

About the editing thing, how hard are we talking bearing in mind it's not something I've really undertaken before?

I've got no shortage of processing power, talent and and ability on the other hand...

[bobthemonkey]

Stu R said:

About the editing thing, how hard are we talking bearing in mind it's not something I've really undertaken before?

I've got no shortage of processing power, talent and and ability on the other hand...

Your actually in quite a good position. A lot of the difficulty comes from people trying to edit new codecs with old machines and software.

By difficult I mean that a number of editing packages do not understand AVCHD, or those that do require you to transcode it to another format which takes some time. The actual procedures within the editing package don't really change.