HD Camcorders for Editing

I've been making movies for a while, and recently my Sony MiniDV camcorder broke. We sent it in at Best Buy at the low cost of 40 dollars only for them to tell us it would cost $400 to fix. That was a big NO. We had already planned on getting a new one before this mishap.

I've been really enthusiastic about getting a HD Camcorder. But I've run across some issues:

Apparently they only record in 3 major formats: DVD, Hard Drive, and Tape. DVD and Hard Drive are compressed while being recorded and can't be edited frame-by-frame. All that can be done to these is adding things before and after shots. The tape cameras could drop frames when the computer is capturing the HD video through the editing software, resulting in a need to recapture the footage until the results are perfect.

I may have some of this information wrong. I've been using very many different editing applications and know what to stick with.

First I got Pinnacle Studio 7, upgraded to 8 or 9 - and had some Hollywood FX pro thing. It didn't turn out too well to say the least. I then upgraded to Avid Liquid Pro. It was an okay program, but it couldn't use many of the formats I wanted to use and had constant errors. Finally I got the Adobe CS3 Production Premium. It's been working like a charm for me but I haven't really gotten a chance to do much with it since my video camera broke.

I think I should get a tape camera unless there is some other format that works better. Any suggestions? (I am a teen, but please take me seriously. I don't plan to make some dinky home movies.)

Thanks
Ethan

 

I have the JVC 30gb HD, and apart from the lack of support from JVC and the instructions being written by a moron, it's a good piece of kit.

The only thing is I have to convert the files to an editable format, like avi using Super (free and converts almost any file format) http://www.erightsoft.net/SUPER.html which I then import into Sony Movie Studio. The only other problem I found was on panning. With my old Sony dv camcord there's no problem when it pans, but with the HD camcord the panning is juddery.

 

Yeah. I'm going to try to steer away from any type of 3rd party software other than the actual editing programs (After Effects and Premiere). So I'm looking for a camera in the 1000-2000 dollar range that can do this...maybe a tape one? I don't know, and I know the 1080i cameras are popular but what about 1080p? Where would I find those?