Buying Advice

[AlanC]

I need to get kitted out & I need advice!!

I've been given the task of overseeing my companys presentations etc. What I want to do is... video record interviews etc, transfer them to PC, edit them, and publish them on our website.

So, what I need to know is... what's the best video camera to buy (DV?), how I'd go about transfering it to the PC and what's the best software to use to edit and publish. I will probably want to publish the movies as a Real Player streaming file and Quicktime... what's the best?

Our budget isn't huge, £700 or so.

By the way, I'm in the UK...

Thanks in advance for any advice.

A.:confused:

[dar1us]

Welcome to the forum. Nice to see a fellow old blighter;).

Depends on what you get to the best way of transferring. I assume that all DV cameras have a digital transfer (stopping any transfer loss). Probably firewire, though I really dont know. You would need a firewire on a computer, they are adaptors, I think they cost about 50 to 100 quids.

Sorry for vaugeness.


dar1us

[theReal]

The best solution nowadays is a DV camcorder with firewire (you'll only need firewire-out if you don't need to play back the video from pc to the camcorder)

A Firewire Adapter (PCI) isn't expensive - it's more like 20 Euro and not 50-100 British Pounds!

Most Adapters come with basic editing software like Ulead Video Studio that might fit your needs already. If you need better software, it's getting more expensive (like 500 USD up to 'infinitely expensive' ;))

The more expensive software will include all the new Real and Quicktime codecs to publish your videos, but you can also buy the encoders seperately (Helix Producer by Real is free with limited encoding possibilities that might be ok for your needs).

If you have more questions about this, I suppose you move over to the "DV" and "NLE" Forums (which are exactly for the topics in question)

[AlanC]

Thanks for your help!!

A.:)

[numlock]

You should encode them to Windows Media Video 9 instead of RealMedia or QuickTIme. It's much better quality.