Starting a thread for those of us would-be directors wanting to shoot our own stuff for fun and profit to discuss cameras :O
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/4 ... D_24p.html
I'm hoping to be able to get one of these fairly soon. Yeah, it's a standard def cam, no HD but it will shoot 24p. The features/controls on it are much more like a professional movie camera than a camcorder (there are also tons of attatchments and stuff for it, including 35mm lenses/rails/follow focus that can give you a REALLY filmlike look) although just out of the box it does amazing stuff. Only reason I'm thinking I'll get one of these is #1 the price, #2 it's for learning the higher end cameras with. I've had some experience, but not enough. I want to get one of these and shoot some short projects, maybe do the film festival circuit with some of them.
and, if I had the extra money to go HD:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/3 ... ormat.html
Granted, there are probably some nicer HD cams out there, but you can't beat this thing for under $10,000. Only drawback is that it uses P2 cards to store the HD footage, and those are expensive, but coming down in price. I would think a good alternative would be a firestore external HD also. Nice thing about this cam is that you can apparently still shoot SD 24p and such with it, to a regular miniDV tape. (so you have SD for those clients/projects that don't require HD)
For a long time I was obsessed with the Canon XL2, but when the DVX came out, it effectively blew the XL2 out of the water, with very similar quality for a lot less money. Same thing with Sony's cams at the time.
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/3 ... 1080i.html
Sony's HD cam
Also looked at this cam:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/4 ... order.html
Which is an HDV camcorder, which seems to be a format that will be kindof a "transition" between miniDV and things like P2 cards and hard drives (or maybe some kind of new HD tape format?)
All stuff to drool over :/
Maybe if I rant about this stuff enough people will kick my arse every time I talk about spending money on other stuff and I'll actually get a cam and shoot a project. (it's up in the air between shooting a project and spending 3500$ on 3d software to make my own indie animation at this point)
fun stuff.


