Looking for advice on camcorders and accessories

[saminsocks]

I am beginning a project that will require me to record interviews, some of which will be in a controlled environment, others which will happen out on the street. The controlled interviews will be shot on a tripod, possibly unattended, but most of the interviews on the street will probably be done handheld. I also need a microphone input so I can record audio with a real microphone and not rely on the internal mic of the camera. I would like to record these with the highest resolution possible, but for the time being the videos will be going on YouTube, so the sharpest camera isn't necessary, but it does need to record in a format that I can edit in iMovie or something similar. There will be very few videos that we record that will be posted directly.

Eventually I want to get two or three cameras, but they don't need to be the same one, since I'm a couple months away from doing interviews in a controlled environment, which is what I'd need the additional cameras for. I don't have a budget at all, so I'd like to find the cheapest cameras I can that will still give me a good product and have the features I'm looking for. Does anyone have any recommendations? One camera I've found that's close to what I'm looking for is the Canon VIXIA HF R100 (http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=compare.jsp&A=details&Q=&sku=671655&is=REG) which I'm still researching, but I'd like to have several options. If you don't have recommendations but know of websites that will let me search for cameras by the features I'm looking for, I'd appreciate that, too. Thanks.

 

[musique]

You might also learn about doing this at one of the web forums focused on people who do this exact thing full- or part-time.

Part of what you're planning to do, especially "on the street" interviews, is basically ENG or Electronic News-Gathering. Though that term grew up with the advent of the smaller film cameras of 25 years past, the initials (ENG) still mean doing live on the spot interviews.

I suggest you do a search on this. You might also want to look at sites like dvxuser.com and dvinfo.net/forum/ for people who are doing this. There are probably many other, similar sites.

Good luck.