[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Bertrand

My intentions are to shoot short fiction movies (previous ones lasted around 10-15 minutes).
It's intended to be edited and burned on DVD for friends.
Nothing towards the internet.

The editing program is a question, yes, as I'm quite dissatisfied with the mpeg2-Nero combination. I haven't sorted that out now.

Looks like I'd have to spend twice as much as I can afford. Well well.
Plus if I do I'll feel embarrassed if I don't use the thing twice a year. It's gonna ruin the fun. Gotta think.

oh hey man i seem to have missed this message.

i say get yourself a nice USED gl1 or gl2 canon. gl1 is older but you can find it cheaper. they were nice cameras! and a good intro level. i bet you can score a great deal if you search around hard enough. if you're super-lucky maybe you could even get a dvx100 for little money-- that's the camera i have and it makes lovely footage, the cine-gamma is great, and it has xlr inputs etc.

most important man that you dont get suckered into a consumer camera with shitty automatic controls-- you want MANUAL. manual focus, manual aperture, manual white balance, manual zoom. and i don't mean that you can adjust these with a little button inside a menu, i mean knobs that are sticking out of the camera body & that you can control while shooting.

that's the most fucking important thing you need really-- the rest is secondary/superfluous in my opinion.

and go for mini-DV. while it's already an ageing format, it's perfect for editing, media is cheap and widely available (you can find tapes in the supermarket), and any and all software will be compatible with it.

about turning mini-DV into dvd, that's another story that will require sorting out later in the future...