Topic: camcorder choice help

[ero3030]

looking for a recorder for my daughter's basketball games.  somthing good enough to send clips to colleges.  somthing under 500$?  under 1000$?  looking for somthing easy to transfer.  thanks,  ed

[guitard]

I'm sure you can get something for less than $500 that'll do the job.  You pretty much don't have a choice anymore as almost everything is either harddrive or flash-drive based now.  Tape-based cams are pretty much gone.

But that isn't a bad thing for you because you want something you can easily transfer and flash-drive cams are definitely easy to transfer.

What you really need to think about IMHO is how to get a good shot that really maximizes the quality of the video you're sending off to colleges ~ I think that will be much more important than the videocam you use to shoot the video.

I recommend getting a good mpeg editor to edit the video - check out Womble MPEG Editor - very easy to use and it doesn't re-encode the video.

And just to make it easy for the schools to which you'll be sending the video - I'd get a DVD authoring program that's easy to use so that when the school receives the DVD - they can just pop it in the player and check it out - and not have to figure out if it can only be played on the computer...what program you need to view the video file, etc.  I recommend TMPGenc DVD Author for an authoring program.

[mblindsey]

I'm pretty happy with my Canon Vixia HF10 and 2x HF11's.  I bought them as refurbs from B&H Photo.  If there wasn't a sticker on the outside of the box that said "refurbished", I wouldn't know the difference.  I've seen some better deals on them recently (I think on deals2buy.com), but here is an HF10 for $499:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/used/539290/Canon_2573B001_VIXIA_HF_10_AVCHD_16GB.html

I think I paid $599 for the HF11.

--Michael

[ero3030]

thanks guys!!   ed