Help me buy a video camera.

romanqwerty

1)Alright, so I'm in the market for a video camera and am looking for suggestions on a good one.

What it needs to be able to do:
I plan to use this to record live music shows and the like so it needs to have a microphone input (not necessarily 3.5mm) and not simply a crappy inbuilt mic.
I would love it if it could record to a quality that I can upload the videos to youtube at least 720p.

What I don't care about:
Battery life (as long as its bigger than 1 hour).
Being bundled with editing software.
Storage. Built in HD, SD card or whatever. It makes no difference to me.


Other than that, I don't really have a budget per say, but I am looking for the best value for money. Under $500 would also be preferable.


2) Where to get it? I'm gonna be in the US (NYC and New Haven CT specifically) for 2 weeks after christmas and figured i'd try to shop for one there because it'll be much cheaper than here in Australia. Although there will be places I could ship it too, i'll be moving around a lot ad much rather prefer to find an actual store I can go get it from since i'm not gambling on whether it'll arrive while i'm there.

EggyToast

For 2), you should plan on going to B&H Photo in Manhattan. Actually, to be honest, your criteria are pretty loose which benefits you. You could seriously just plan on going to B&H photo and say "these are the things I'm looking for" and you'd get as good of a recommendation as anything you'll get here. They're good people, and their prices are great.

That being said, you should probably consider storage that is solid state, be it SD or built-in. A disc-based HDD will be prone to breaking, since video cameras move quite a bit compared to a desktop computer, and if you had tape you'd hate the process of getting video off of the camera. With something that's solid state, you can basically just drag & drop when you plug in the camera.

So you're not too surprised, pretty much every video camera on the market will do at minimum 720p and most of what you should be looking for with a mic input is ease of integration. Do you have a mic you can bring with you in to a store?

romanqwerty

EggyToast wrote:

For 2), you should plan on going to B&H Photo in Manhattan. Actually, to be honest, your criteria are pretty loose which benefits you. You could seriously just plan on going to B&H photo and say "these are the things I'm looking for" and you'd get as good of a recommendation as anything you'll get here. They're good people, and their prices are great.

That being said, you should probably consider storage that is solid state, be it SD or built-in. A disc-based HDD will be prone to breaking, since video cameras move quite a bit compared to a desktop computer, and if you had tape you'd hate the process of getting video off of the camera. With something that's solid state, you can basically just drag & drop when you plug in the camera.

So you're not too surprised, pretty much every video camera on the market will do at minimum 720p and most of what you should be looking for with a mic input is ease of integration. Do you have a mic you can bring with you in to a store?

I'm likely going to be running my SM57 or something else through a yamaha preamp that has output in the form of 1/4" audio cable or 3.5mm using an adaptor.