Find the right Movie Camera

If you are interested in making home movies (which has been an American household hobby from the 50s), you will need a movie camera for your recordings. The first thing you will need to decide is between film based VHS cameras or Digital DV Cams. A Digital Video (DV) Camera is a professional piece of equipment, and may be for advanced amateurs only. Let us for this article, consider the average home user wanting to make and edit movies. For this use, one of the many handy cams on the market more than serve the purpose, some of them is in the semi professional range.

When selecting a handy cam, remember not to worry about the quality of its still imaging. Although most handy cams do offer a still photography mode, this will never be comparable to cameras specially designed for still photography, so its not worth worrying about that. As with any camera, the lens zoom feature will enable you to shoot creative footage, and look for a god branded lens with a wide range of zoom capability, meaning from extreme wide to extreme close up. This will allow you to give neat zoom shots to your videos. Do remember to purchase a sturdy and lightweight tripod as well; it will give your home movies that professional touch.

As far as video cameras go, you wont be troubled with issues about mega pixels, in fact the frame size of a digital camera will be similar to monitor resolutions (640 by 480, 800 by 600 etc). This is sufficient for moving images. Since the resolution of a color television set is many times less than a monitor, you won’t be missing out on anything even if you do shoot on a low-resolution mode. It may be worth your while purchasing an extra battery and memory cards, since they are one time investments (if the battery is a rechargeable one, that’s what you want).

With handy cams its best to stick to brand leaders like Sony and Panasonic. In fact if you had to choose between a cheaper new item, and a used Sony, go for the used Sony. Many models are available on www.ebay.com, which is a great place to look for new and used digital (and manual) video cameras.

The advantage of using a digital video camera is that you will never spend money on tapes and film. Also, with simple editing software on a home computer you can add titles, background music, and re edit the whole home movie, that’s something you could never do yourself with VHS tape cameras. The battle between conventional (still) cameras and digital still goes on, but as far as digital video is concerned, for home movie making, digital is far ahead with advantages when compared to tape based manuals.