camcorder noob needs help

[Goaty]

hi,

hoping I can get a little friendly advice here. my daughter wants a camcorder for christmas, she is only 11 so I want to get her a real camcorder for her but nothing too $$$.

the goal here is to get her something point&shoot, where she can transfer digital video to her PC, play with editing programs, and burn DVDs.

from my research on the web (i am clueless about this stuff) it seems that I should get a miniDv camcorder and use firewire connection to transfer the digital video to her PC. so i will need to get her a firewire hub and dvd burner also. she has my old PC, AMD AthlonXP 2000+ with 512 MB RAM & ATI 9600 vidcard.

am i on the right track here? is that PC good enough for her to play around with some video editing? do I have the miniDv->firewire to PC-> burn DVD loop right? any and all advice is much appreciated!

 

[gsellis]

Yes, you are on the right track. MiniDV is probably the best format, even though it will be at least $50 more than the cheap VHS-C and Hi-8 cameras still on the market. You will need a firewire connection, but no necessarily a hub. A PCI Firewire card, preferrably with a TI chipset, will do. The Creative Labs Audigy 2 cards, audio, also have a Firewire port on them.

You old PC is pretty good. In this order, consider adding storage, processor, memory if you want to do upgrades anyway. Video is fine. A 1 hour tape will yield 13GB of space used. Editing and creating a DVD will add up to another 10GB of overhead. 250GB drives are now at $100. A newer drive will probably be faster (guessing there is a 30-60GB drive in it now). You only need that as a data drive, so no need to move the OS, etc.

The processor is OK, but will be a little slow for some tasks (hey, that is what birthdays are for, right? ) The memory is OK (my other editor still only has 384MB), but more will speed it up a little (NLEs, Non-Linear Editors, were created to run in sparse memory for what they load).

Some video editors have DVD built in. I am partial to Pinnacle as that is what my mainline stuff is. Pinnacle Studio 9 has been good and has DVD burning on the timeline. The just released version 10 (now Avid), but it is hit or miss as far as bugs go. Sony and Adobe now also have consumer editors. MySonic? and Ulead also make such packages.

On the DVD front, you are in serious luck. DVD drives are now cheap and media has hit < 30 cents a disc. I usually recommend Pioneer, but the latest release has not been stellar. You can order a NEC 3540 for under $40 from Newegg and get the retail version for a few dollars more (includes a Nero OEM version that is limited, but gives other basic burning capabilities.)

For more camcorder info, see Camcorder info. Prices start at about $275 up to $12000. There are some good discussions here, but camcorder info will have fairly good detail. On the mid-low end, a Panasonic GS65 might be good. The 3CCD cameras have good color. The single advantage a Panasonic has over Canon and Sony in the small form factor market is they top load. The others have to be removed from a tripod to change tape.

Other things to consider... Tripod. This is a tough one. Cheap tripods are the pits for panning, but for someone learning, it fits the budget. I would recommend one as shooting a clean clip handheld is a craft and requires 100's of hours of practice and good optical stabilization.

XP does come with Windows Movie Maker, which can edit video. The only issue is that it does not do DVD rendering (-> MPEG-2). It can export to DV-AVI and another application can be used to create the DVD.

Got to do some other stuff.... later

 

[Goaty]

thanks very much, this is just the information that i needed