What is the best video camera in the price range of 400-450?

Question

What is the best video camera in the price range of 400-450?

Right now i am looking at the DCR-SR45 30GB Handycam® Camcorder. I am looking for a camcorder with decent still (for stop motion) and can upload short home movie clips easily to sony vegas and to the web. I am just wandering if there is any better camera in the price range! Thanks.

6 seconds ago - 3 days left to answer.

Answer 1

For any specific questions, you should check out http://www.stopmotionanimation.com

It's a message board filled with stop motion animators helping eachother out. They even have a handbook section that has basic answers and info on a variety of stop motion topics (armatures, sets, cameras, etc)

http://www.stopmotionanimation.com/handb...

Here's what they had to say about camcorders:

CAMCORDERS

You can use ANY camcorder for stopmotion, assuming you use it properly. Now, to qualify that statement, NO camcorder (with the exception of the Sanyo IDshot) will shoot single frames. You have to use them in conjunction with your computer, running a framegrabber program to ‘capture’ images from the live video feed. And yes, you can even use your old analog camcorder that’s been gathering dust since you bought it in the 80s. For that you’d need to get an analog/digital signal converter. Canopus makes a good line of these at affordable prices, some are cards you insert into your computer and some are standalone devices like the ADVC-100 (Analog/Digital Video Converter).

If you get a DV camcorder then you won’t need a converter. But in either case, you need to make sure your computer has either Firewire or USB ports (whichever the camera or digital converter has).

When using a camcorder for stopmotion, you DO NOT use any tape or record anything with the camcorder itself... you only use it to provide a live video feed to the computer for a framegrabber to capture images from. Many camcorders will automatically shut down (losing all your stored setting) after 5 minutes if there’s a tape in the deck... what you want to do is take the tape out, and if it still wants to shut down, simply open the tape deck and keep it open while you animate. Don’t run it on batteries... an animation session can go for many hours, and you’ll go through a lot of batteries. Get an AC adapter and plug it into the wall.

PROS:

Instant feedback and flawless interfacing with framegrabbers, same as webcams. But with camcorders you get better optics (they cost more).

CONS:

In order to get the full user control described above, you pretty much have to opt for a “pro-sumer” level camcorder, which start at around $2000. Most ordinary consumer models are “point and shoot”, meaning they do the focusing and adjusting for you.

But John Edmark has provided this information: Panasonic's PV-GS series of camcorders all seem to have these necessary manual controls. Several of these are older models, now discontinued and available on eBay. For example, the PV-GS19 is regularly selling for ~$150. John was able to test it out with both StopMotionPro on a PC and iStopMotion and FrameThief on a Mac. It worked great with all of them. The manual controls operated exactly as advertised. I assume the same will be true of the GS 59, 19, 35, 15, 65, etc (based on the description of their manual controls at CamcorderInfo.com)

Answer 2

Canon FS100 (but you have to purchase an SD card for memory). Since you're using Sony Vegas, I do prefer you sticking with Sony camcorders since they are more compatible with one another. The Canon FS100 has a superb 48x zoom and is a tad bigger than the inner tube of toilet paper. If you think you want the Canon FS100, be my guest. But I'm a little shaky if it's compatible with the Sony Vegas.