which camera? advice appreciated

[jonbutterworth]

I am planning on making a documentary in the UK, India, SA and Finland documenting the stories of victims of human rights abuse.

I have very little camcorder knowlegde. Can anyone advise me on which camera I should buy. He is as much info about the project and my requirements:

- I have a budget of 1000 pounds max.

- I will be interviewing victims and so need good sound as well - so needs external mic or should I go for a seperate sound recorder and edit the two together?

- I will be filming victims on the move as they visit locations in their areas so I think I need good auto focus and image stabiliser and potentially good optical zoom

- I will have a lot of footage so I need to be able to store it easily

- I want the doc to be viewed on dvd and distributed with a book i am writing and on website blog - I need the viewer to take it seriously and not notice that it is filmed by an amateur and not say 'this is crap quality' but I do not need it to be broadcast quality.

- I need something reasonably portable and light and hardy to take with me on my travels,

- I may be filming in low light but I am not sure of this - I will look to avoid it but this may be a consideration.

- Essntially should I go for handycam such as Canon Legria HF S100 Camcorder or should I go for a shoulder mounted camera such as Canon XH A1s (or something a bit cheaper) and try and get it second hand. Do I need this type of pro camera for my project do you feel?

- In summary, Which camera should I go for and which sound equip should I go for?

Best wishes,

Jonny Butterworth

 

[PhuBandit]

The canon hv40 right now is the best for manual focus, external mic jack and it shoots in HD to miniDV tapes. It can also shoot in 24p (film look) and turns out if its a documentary, usually you'll probably want it to look like professional if your going to distribute it I'm guessing.

Overall the Canon's are leaders in quality picture, lens and zoom. I have the Canon Vixia HV40 and the Sony hdr xr-100 at the moment and I like the Canon more...

So if you like shooting on tape format then the Vixia HV40 is probably the best consumer camera to get that near to professional film. But usually you could always post-prod your footage in editing software to convert 30fps to 24p, but takes a bit longer. tapes are pretty expensive so if you want awesome storage then a Harddrive camcorder is probably the best way to go.

The canon xh a1 is like $5000, I don't know how much 1000 pounds is in conversion but if you do get the xh a1 then that is a totally worthwhile semi-pro camera. Portable, and I think it can shoot at 25f which also is close to film-look. But storage is also on MiniDV and also has the option of SD card storage. (16gigs max) and most cameras have the built in feature of 16:9 letterboxing already, so that's an added bonus expecially if the completed documentary is going to DVD.

So finally, I guess the Vixia camcorder is cheap and has most practical functions for your trip; while the Canon XH A1 is more of a expensive semi-pro cam, so if you think of buying it you must probably be using it for more documentarys/films in the future.

Only my 2 cents anyway, I'm newbie and would love to get my hands on a xh a1 but its too expensive atm, probably when I go to work i'll save up.