Looking for a cheap camera to make a short film?

Question

i'm a beginner and i've only used digital cameras to make small clips so far...so i'm hoping someone could brief me in on what i should be looking for

what's important and what's not if your looking for a say handycam to make a short film

i really don't want to spend too much money on it since i'm a student

and i want the short film to really LOOK like a short film and not some really bad clip with horrible quality

thanks for the help!

Answer 1

if you are a student then I would say these are the options:

See what gear the University or College has and then use it.

Hire gear instead, you'll get okay quality for holdiays and aprties from most camcorders, if you want to do goods looking footage you need a camera with manual settings, manual audio, you also need lights etc.  It becomes very costly.  Hiring keeps the cost lower but using the right kit.

There is a reason the BBC and Sky don't use cameras bought from comet.

I would focus your energies on the quality of direction and content, and don;t get hung up on the camera so much.  A well told story will always shine through, even a Red 2k camera wouldn't hide poor prep.

Answer 2

Depending on the price you want, I know of a few good ones, I searched for a long time for one and finally found the Casio Exilim z-77. It has a YouTube mode and it takes great videos, but its about $170 The Casio z-75 is the same, but without the YouTube mode, but it takes videos which you can upload to YouTube. I'll put links to these cameras in the source. Another I found thats way cheaper but seems good for just random video making (which was what I was trying to do =) I found the Polaroid i531. It's around $80 and a very good deal, considering its 5 mega-pixels and thats a really good price for something like that.If you have the money for the casio, go for it, but if you have a very limited budget, the polariod is a good one to go with