Camcorder recommendations

[sbilstein]

Hey guys,

I used to mess around with digital video a lot in middle school, and film silly things like skateboarding, lego movies, chemistry experiments I didn't understand, and now that I'm in college and have lots of fat scholarship money to burn I was looking into buying a relatively inexpensive camcorder to mess around with.
I spent my first year at school working on serious productions and stuff on our campus tv station but that stuff really did not interest me.
I have little interest in learning all the ins and outs of video production but I want to be able to film different things I work on and I don't need really high quality film.
I'm also running heron on an inspiron 1501. I was wondering which brand/model camcorder you would recommend for making youtube quality videos. Also, what editing program would you recommend? I would prefer something more along the lines of iMovie rather than Final Cut Pro. Does any program like that exist for linux? I'd hate to revert back to windows after one year clean just to make short clips and such.

Thanks!

[tamoneya]

Here are my tips:
1. Go miniDV tape or Harddrive. Stay away from the mini DVD. They have increased compression and shorter recording times.
2. Stay away from the avchd codec. It will probably cause you all kinds of trouble. Wiki has a list of camcorders using it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVCHD.
3. If you have money to burn go for a 3 CCD camera. Much better colors and better in low light.

EDIT:
4. Use the firewire cable instead of the USB. When using USB some cameras add additional compression and down sampling also it is slower.

[lisati]

I have four camcorders: one Hi-8 which needs an analogue capture card to talk to my computers, two which are Firewire/DV/i.link/iee1384 capable, and one HDD-based. The first three are tape-based, and the last isn't....

Personally, I wouldn't touch a DVD camcorder, most of the stuff I record goes on longer than the 60 minutes or so that you can squeeze onto a mini DVD.
The main advantage of the HDD variety is that there's no hunting for tapes, which have a habit of running out just in the middle of something important. Other than that, it's up to you.

[lisati]

I have four camcorders: one Hi-8 which needs an analogue capture card to talk to my computers, two which are Firewire/DV/i.link/iee1384 capable, and one HDD-based. The first three are tape-based, and the last isn't....

Personally, I wouldn't touch a DVD camcorder, most of the stuff I record goes on longer than the 60 minutes or so that you can squeeze onto a mini DVD.
The main advantage of the HDD variety is that there's no hunting for tapes, which have a habit of running out just in the middle of something important. Other than that, it's up to you.

Afterthought: Don't bother with a model that does 5.1 Dolby Surround: that sort of stuff is probably better dealt with in post-production.

As for editing software, there are some to choose from with Linux, such as Kino (which can be used with a DV connection to import footage from your camera).

[C!V!NT]

In terms of editing, if you want something similar to final cut pro, you'll probably want something along the lines on cinelerra or MainActor (although mainactor is a discontinued product, and proprietary).

Kino is best for extracting from miniDV tapes (I use it with my panasonic NV-GS320) since it provides a good frontend for dvgrab, but in terms of editing, its not great, since it can only handle one video track, and one audio track, so if you want to overlay music, you have to make do with none of the sound recorded :\

Some editing applications/suites worth looking into are:
Cinelerra
Mainactor (although you can't buy it anymore)
kdenlive
PiTiVi

Cinelerra is similar to finalcut (but much less powerful), kdenlive and pitivi are more similar to windows movie maker and imovie.