I am using Imovie Hd to shoot videos on youtube, but the quality sucks. What camera should I use?

Question

I am using the webcam on my mac laptop. Can any of you recommend a good camera who's quality will still stay high when i upload to youtube?

Answer 1

For best video quality, any miniDV tape based camcorder. You will also need a 4-pin to 6- pin firewire cable (connects the camcorder DV port to the firewire 400 port on your Mac.

A small step down in video quality will be a hard drive based camcorder. Video files will transfer via USB. You will need to download and install StreamClip (free from Apple):

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/vi... and convert the files to DV.

Same thing happens with flash memory camcorders.

DO NOT BUY A DVD BASED CAMCORDER. The video quality is terrible - especially for editing.

Answer 2

A mini dv camcorder would be perfect. Anything less than that isn't worth it. Nu'uanu is pretty much correct, but I would not recommend a usb cam or anything like that. They are impractical and not worth the money.

Most mini dv cameras these days are 3 ccd's, which is what you want (each primary color is captured separately, giving you a better picture). You can also get a hdd (hard disk drive) camera (records digital files to a hard drive to be transferred to your computer), which is a nice feature - you won't have to deal with tapes, or record (capture) in imovie. Just make sure the files store on the hard drive are imovie compatible. This is as easy as googling the camera's name + "imovie" - if your search doesn't take you to forums with people crying about formatting issues, you're good.

Do this, and it's possible to achieve the best results possible. Here's why: it costs a lot of money for youtube to host all those videos, which is why they limit all videos to 100mb. This is why your youtube video can look almost as good as anything filmed with a prosumer or professional camera (unless they pay to advertise/get better quality). To get the best results, you want to make a file as big as possible without going over that limit. Bigger files means more information/photo quality being packed into every frame, every second of video.

If you want to take the easy road, click on quicktime and find the option with the biggest estimated file size without going over 100. Ipod is another one to look at, too.

If you want to get more complicated, use the "expert" setting, click options and use the right video settings. I'm attaching a link at the bottom. Basically, make the video H.264, 320x240, 15 frames a second, and limit the kb/s to a certain number. Anything besides these settings is just wasting space. For kb/s, somewhere within 2000-5000 is a pretty safe number, but you'll get better at finding at it over time. . This will all sound more clear once you go into iMovie and look at what I'm talking about.