Advice Please.....

Hi

I am intending on videoing some cars in action at an airfield...I have a budget of between £700-800 to spend...there will be inside the car action as well so I would presume a stablizer would be important as well as decent audio for engine sound etc...

I understand digital is better quality than analogue but I presume they both use tapes.. so am I right in thinking that when you connect it to your PC you cant just download the video from memory it still has to come off the tape ??

It would be great if there was a clear choice of camcorder in this price range..but I could go a liitle more if there was something outstanding which is a bit more...

Thanks

Jabba

 

with my limited knowledge...

I'd say that depending on the road surface & driving style you are going to get a lot of camera shake no matter what you use. No way a hand held camera will avoid that, but maybe that will be ok as you want to get some sensation of speed? And perhaps you could fix it into the car somehow?

The sound - make sure you can get an external mic.

You definitely want digital. Most use tape although there are a couple on the market now that use DVD-RAM instead which is interesting but for PC compatibility you're probably better off with a standard miniDV camera.

And since a minute of PALDV takes up about 140 MB you can be sure that any length of recorded video isn't going to fit into memory just yet - give it a couple of years for those 10 Gig SD cards

The cars will be further away than you expect, so get the highest optical zoom you can for the money as long as you're not compromising other things.

In terms of the actual camera to go for... I have no idea. There are a lot in that price range - a friend has the JVC DVP707 which cost hom 700ish and generally, is very good but has no external MIC capability. Have a read of a couple of magazines, make sure you can fit an external MIC and for stability you'll probably want to have it on a tripod next to the track so one that loads tape from the bottom will probably be annoying.

And get one from somewhere with a no quibbles 30 day money back offer so you can take it back after the racing

Chods

 

Hi

Thanks for the advice, I am renting the airfield my self and there my cars were filming so I have a little more control on that..great idea on the tripod...anywhere you could recommend to get all the stuff from ??

I couldnt find a way to do a search through the camera reviews to filter out all the poor cams and just show the decent ones...thought you may have have been able to do it throuhg the rating field...

Thanks

Jabba