Dont know if you are dead set on a miniDV cam, but mabey i could suggest a Hard drive camcorder?? They are really good in the fact that you dont have to keep buying recording media. Im contemplating buying this guy: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8240968&type=product&productCategoryId=pcmcat91400050051&id=1170290183584
That one is 30 Gig.
I think you get like 7 hours of recording time (more than enough for a tourney), you upload it to your computer then repeat. :wgrin:
Seems like a good solution if your gonna record tourneys.
If you’re going to be doing a lot of editing, I’d recommend against the getting the hard drive camcorder. Editing MPEG-2 video is a pain and the final video probably won’t look as good…
I agree. While it might seem pretty convenient, it truely is a pain to edit. I really don’t think HDD camcorders are ready for primetime. When you start seeing high end cameras ($3k and above) using hard drives then you know they’ve worked everything out. Now, if you just plan to take your video and put it straight to disk without editing, then that’s a different story. I doubt this will happen in the end though.
From a filmmaker’s perspective (looking for manual controls and features that actually do something) I would go with that panasonic pv-320 as well. The 3CCD chips will allow for it to capture color well and the fact that it has manual controls will allow you to set the shutter speed right so you won’t have those retarded black bars because TV’s are interlaced. That and it is one of the cheapest cameras that will have OIS (Optical image stabilization) so you can reduce the shakiness. EIS (eletrical image stabilization) blows because it reduces the resolution of the picture in order to pull that feature off. I’m not saying none of these other cameras won’t have it, but with budget in mind, the pv-gs320 is very good.