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View Full Version : Musicians and Camcorder Recommendations



Xica_da_Silva
February 10th, 2009, 09:34 PM
Hi Ubuntu Community,

I'm looking to purchase my very first camcorder, and am wondering if anyone here can recommend a particular one that would work for me?
Here's my situation: I play acoustic guitar and sometimes sing while I'm playing. I would like to be able to tape myself playing and singing and maybe even upload those videos onto YouTube(oh no, just what we need!)at some point. I've got a webcam on my laptop but the sound and video quality is not so great...I'm wondering if getting a video cam with 2 microphone jacks is desirable or even possible(separate channels for voice and guitar while doing both at the same time), and if the sound quality would be better enhanced by using microphones or does sound quality have more to do with using an video/audio editing application after the fact(or a combination of both)? I don't need pro-level tools but something reasonable for a budget-minded person. Any musicians out there who have a video cam that they already have been using and would recommend??? Your help would be greatly appreciated.

Note: I'm posting here instead of the other help areas because I don't want to be confused with someone whose computer is about to slide down a sinkhole in 5 minutes and needs immediate attention.

Tomosaur
February 11th, 2009, 01:01 AM
I have a Panasonic SDR-S7 which I use for this exact purpose. It's a great little camera, and the sound quality is good too. I have recorded my band playing live with it (very loudly!) and the sound quality is far better than I expected it to be. Obviously it's not really intended for this use, but it does a better job than I thought it would do, and recording myself playing and singing with an acoustic guitar - the quality is fine.

As a bonus - it connects fine via USB to Ubuntu and Totem played the .MOD files (the video format it creates) first time I tried - although for uploading to Youtube or whatever you'll have to convert them to some other format (which is easy).

mips
February 11th, 2009, 01:25 AM
Would a normal stereo camcorder with external mic jack not work? Essentially just split the stereo jack into two mono jacks?

These days I would buy a hard drive based camcorder. The rest all depends on your budget.

http://www.camcorderinfo.com/
http://www.digitalcamera-hq.com/camcorders/
http://www.videomaker.com/learn/product-reviews/digital-camcorder-reviews/

Xica_da_Silva
February 11th, 2009, 09:52 PM
Thanks for the recommendations.

Anyone else have any other video cams they'd like to recommend?