Well...I'm bored. So I'm just going to rant about purchasing a camera first:
Whenever purchasing anything, whether related to video or life in general, think about what you WANT and then think about what you NEED. There is a big difference, and being able to see what you need and what you can hold off on will save you head aches and money. You don't need a $30,000 Sony CineAlta camera to shoot your kid's football game. That's swatting flies with a nuke if you do that.Â
So how do you know what you need? Well, decide what you want to shoot and go from there. To use myself as an example, in high school I started off shooting my school's sports teams and editing 1-minute highlight montages of each sport. Now it seems that's going to be the branch of the industry I'll be working in since I've been getting a lot of freelance work involving sports.Â
With that being said, I plan on getting a new camera sometime soon, so what I need to do is research. It sucks, but it pays off. The other day I read an article from Videomaker about interlace vs progressive. I already knew what the differences were, but never gave it a thought about which would be better for me (camcorders gives you all the options these days anyway). In the article it states that interlace scans faster and will be more crisp during fast motion, but progressive doesn't have the "jitter" of interlaced-footage freeze frames. So you would assume that interlace is the way to go if you were shooting sports, right? You don't need freeze frames or slow-mo that much. Turns out, 60p gives you the best of both worlds. 60 progressive frames per second will give you the crisp images of interlace during fast motion since it's so many fps, but also gives you the nice freeze frames and slo-mo of progressive scanning. It's the best of both worlds (after reading the article, I'm assuming 24p isn't the best choice for sports). Now, all that I knew except for the 60p being the best of both worlds (i just never thought of it), but it just goes to show that doing some research (or stumbling across articles) will guide you in the direction of an appropriate camcorder.Â
You'll find that when you do your research, answering one question will lead to even more questions. To start out though, I start with questions like: What's my price range? What format do I want (personally, I'm avoiding HDV)? What am I shooting and what are the technical things I need to know to shoot it at the highest quality (like my example above)? How will I record audio, do I need a camera with XLR connections? What manual controls do I want? How about CMOS or CCD sensors? There is a big difference I think. What kind of media does it record to? From there, you'll probably start asking more questions as you answer some of your initial questions.Â
Also, look at B&H and look at the specifications of some cameras just to see what's available, even if it's out of your price range. See what features it has and if you come across something you've never heard of, research it. See if it's something you want in a camera thats in you're price range. Maybe you'll find it, maybe not.
A lot of purchases should be researched before hand. That's just the way it is. Unfortunately, technology improves fast...too fast. So you're new gadget is out dated in a week. So keep in mind that having the latest equipment isn't a factor at all, it's whether or not your equipment does what it's supposed to do and fulfills your needs. Â
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