Camcorder

[davidI]

Well, I'm faced with a decision here. I spent 2.5 years traveling and took some pretty incredible shots with my DSLR (only one of the 6.3MP Rebels). I do love photography and have been into it for 15 years now, from developing B&W to now wrapping my head around the nuances in digital.

It looks like I'll be off for another year of travel and think I should either upgrade to a new SLR Body, or get an HD Camcorder and try my hand at filming a "backpacker documentary".

Thing is, I know nothing about Video and have very little time to research it in the next month before I head out. Can anyone give me a quick run down on things I should think about? Any recommendations on what sort of camera I'll need to take some decent quality and have some of the manual functions that will allow me to grow in the video realm. I'm thinking Prosumer level..

Thx

[89coupe]

We bought this little guy, its quite amazing actually. Incredible video quality and quite reasonably priced. The only thing you must remember is to buy a super fast memory card

Its super small as well.

http://sanyo.com/xacti/english/products/vpc_fh1/index.html

[davidI]

Nice. Now that I think about it, dropping $2k on a Prosumer camera may be a bad idea for travel....it will be too bulky to carry everywhere and I could face some trouble at immigration if they take me for a journalist.

May I ask how much you paid for your FH1 and where you got it? Those waterproof Sanyos look pretty cool but I doubt the video quality is as good. As much as I'd love to film while scuba diving I think the better quality is mroe important!

[89coupe]

Originally posted by davidI
Nice. Now that I think about it, dropping $2k on a Prosumer camera may be a bad idea for travel....it will be too bulky to carry everywhere and I could face some trouble at immigration if they take me for a journalist.

May I ask how much you paid for your FH1 and where you got it? Those waterproof Sanyos look pretty cool but I doubt the video quality is as good. As much as I'd love to film while scuba diving I think the better quality is mroe important!

We bought ours from the Camerastore here in Calgary.

http://www.thecamerastore.com/products/catalog/camcorders/sanyo-fh1-hd-camcorder-black

[Weapon_R]

I've got the CANON HG40 and I think its a very good HD camcorder. The HF10 and HF100 are amazing too. Check out the videos of all three cameras at vimeo.com

[davidI]

Thanks for the recommendations. After doing a lot of research it looks like I'll want to stick to tape media (HDV / MiniDV) for documentary style filming. Without goign the prosumer route and getting a HVR-HD1000U or HVR A1U (too bulky for travel) it sounds like the recommendation may be a Canon HV40.

I also need to think about what sort of laptop I'll need to successfully edit the film. This could end up being a $4-5k venture!!

[davidI]

After doing more research I've made a new post with respect to this - thanks to everyone for their help in this thread. Looking for someone who actively edits video and knows their $hit to help a brotha out!!!

http://forums.beyond.ca/showthread.php?s=&threadid=275528