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Prosumer Camcorder - $2000 Budget

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desiringGod

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 15, 2008
110
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I am looking for a new prosumer HD camcorder for our church. It will serve two functions:
1. Broadcast video from the service to the "Crying baby" area
2. Shoot videos (to promote events, as object lessons in the service, etc)

The budget is around $2000 +/- $500.

We use FCE for editing.

Please let me know your suggestions. It has been a long time (10 years) since I have used a prosumer type camera, so I am out of the loop on the cameras out there, although I have heard panasonic makes a good one.
 
desiringGod said:
I am looking for a new prosumer HD camcorder for our church... although I have heard panasonic makes a good one.
Click to expand...
I do not yet own a prosumer camera, so others on this site will may be better able to guide you. The one I'm currently looking at is the Panasonic HMC150, street price about $3K. The Canon HXA1 is good and you might be able to find a used one for cheaper. From looking at other posts, it appears there's not much between $1K and $3K. If you want to go consumer, the Canon HV30 gets high marks.
 
when do you need it by... i would wait for NAB and see if anything new pops up if so then see if anything released floats your boat and or prices will fall on current models.
Why do you need HD?
 
puckhead193 said:
when do you need it by... i would wait for NAB and see if anything new pops up if so then see if anything released floats your boat and or prices will fall on current models.
Why do you need HD?
Click to expand...

We need to order in a week or two.

HD is not required, but it is preferable. The thought is that if we are buying a camera to be used for a while, it might as well have HD.

Thanks to all for your reply so far.
 
desiringGod said:
Any thoughts on this panasonic (AG-HMC70) with the SD card instead of Mini DV?
Click to expand...

I do not know about the quality of this particular camera, but I am familiar with the codec it uses, AVCHD.

There's a post on this forum from a few months back with a lot of good info and opinions on using solid state/hard drive capture vs. tape, if you can find it. There are many higher end formats that record onto hard drive/solid state and tape, but mostly you will see AVCHD and HDV. AVCHD is always recorded onto onto solid state/hard drive, and HDV is always recorded onto tape.

When using AVCHD (such as on this camera), you will need to import it into your computer hard drive, then transfer it (transcode) into Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC) in FCE before you can edit with it. AVCHD would be too taxing on standard duel core computers to edit natively, and no Apple editing system allows you to edit AVCHD natively. You will also want to back up the original AVCHD files so it is on two separate hard drives before erasing your capture cards. Expect a hard drive to fail.

With HDV (which is always tape), you can import (capture) directly as HDV and edit on this format. Tape is generally considered a more reliable back up method than hard drives.

I prefer solid state capture rather than tape, but this is only a preference, and I have read that most of the people here prefer tape.

Best of luck,
Chris
 
Got it narrowed down to:
Panasonic AG-HMC70
Panasonic AG-HMC150
Canon xh-a1

We may wait until after NAB show, but not sure yet.
 
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