What kind of camera do you use?

I'm in need of one. A cheap one perferably but as long as it has a decent picture / sound and can EASILY load to a computer. Thanks!

-Jeff

I use a slightly raggedy Canon PowerShot A540.

great thread!

Im looking forward to seeig what other members use

I use a Nikon D200



I LOOOOVE my camera, but it ain't cheap! LOL

I use a Logitech Quickcam Pro for notebooks. I'm still able to pump out HD 720p videos (with the right rendering tools, of course) onto youtube with it. the built in mic is terrible though. I have a pretty fancy schmancy audio setup.

You can see here at http://www.youtube.com/jmiclovesyou . My "Selfish" cover and "Sunday Morning" cover are in 720p HD.

But since you mentioned you needed one with great sound, most modern digital still cameras nowadays have great built-in mics that pick up voice and instruments really well and will definitely get the job done. I guess it all depends on how much money you want to spend, and if you want image stabilization (i.e. camcorders).

I hope this helps, I'm not sure exactly what kind of camera you were talking about.

I have a Nikon Coolpix S51 (I think). Nothing too fancy, but takes pretty decent pics and video, USB connect makes uploading easy. Serves it purpose at least.

jmic, good lord. I have the same webcam, and when I render it that high, it looks like a bunch of junk. I have no microphone, but the one that's built in to it, and yes. It's complete garbage. Great for skype calls and such, but not for recording audio. I'm still looking at USB mics.

BluesDrive said:

jmic, good lord. I have the same webcam, and when I render it that high, it looks like a bunch of junk. I have no microphone, but the one that's built in to it, and yes. It's complete garbage. Great for skype calls and such, but not for recording audio. I'm still looking at USB mics.

Click to expand...

Well for starters, if you're gonna render that high of a resolution, it's good to have the h.264 codec. It really allows for a large amount of information to be stored in a relatively small amount of space.

Here are my exact video/audio properties when rendering with Sony Vegas Pro 8.0:


* The ffdshow video codec is a thingie I downloaded in order to get the h.264 codec. It has it's own properties that you can edit, but it looks rather complicated. After some dilly-dallying, I just made sure that it was encoding the video in h.264, and chose my bitrate as 6052 kbps.

Hopefully this isn't all jibberish to the folks reading, hehe.

Although I have no experience with USB mics, I'm sure they're engineered for the ease of use. I don't think you'll have any trouble if you stick to some known brands like MXL or Blue.

Edit: I render my HD videos to .avi. Also, my webcam captures video at 960 x 720 and calls it "HD".