Recommendations for a camcorder. what is the best to use for recording bands ?

[funkgod]

Reading some of the posts I feel there are some bass chatters here with a good knowledge of
camcorders, and so any help here would be great.
I know nothing of what cam to use and the whole issue of which one to use, bang for buck,
is just a guess to me, there is so much info on the net all protesting this is the best,
so thought it best to ask the people who use it for what i want to use it for.

I would be using it for 2 reasons
1) to record live footage, this would be under stage lighting led par cans etc, but would want
the best sound i can get for my cash,
are there any with 2x jack inputs so i can attach 2 L+R good quality mics and get them wide
also are there certain mics that work better with camcorders being a more compressed sound.
or would it be better to record the live sound on a dedicated digi recorder then add later ?
if so which digi recorder ??
Are the ones with the internal hard drives or sd card better ?
Which are the best ones in price categories of say
up to £300
up to £600
up to £900 i would not want to spend over this really but if combined with (2 ) below then ok


2) to record a band demo film using some live footage with daylight filming as well.


Last but not least, easy to use editing software ?

Sorry so many questions in one post, gives you an idea of how little i know,

Thanks all, if you can help its very much appreciated.

Edited August 9, 2013 by funkgod

[flyfisher]

For a basic record of a band, almost anything will do a half-decent job in a 'home movie' sense. But for any sort of demo/promo work I reckon you'd need to record the sound separately because most 'affordable' camcorders have pretty limited audio capability and 'auto-level' inputs can result in very poor results, especially if the music has a lot of dynamics.

Video-wise, a big quality issue is their performance in low light conditions, although a noisy/grainy picture can sometime look good, again depending on the type of music.

As for editing software, I'm a bit out of date these days but the biggest issue when I was more into such things was the emergence of HD video and the complications arising when trying to do really accurate cuts in time to music. it's complicated to explain why but it's all to do with the fact that HD video is so highly compressed that each 'frame' of video doesn't contain all the data for that frame and it relies on knowing some of the previous data, or a 'group of pictures' or GOP. DVDs (mpeg) use GOP compression but HD video need more compression so it uses longer GOPs. If you make a cut in the middle of a GOP the editing software has to do a lot of reprocessing of the video data and can reduce the video quality. Different video editing software handles long GOPs in different ways. Depends how finicky you are.

Edit:
Some background here: [url="http://broadcastengineering.com/hdtv/editing-long-gop-video"]http://broadcastengi...-long-gop-video[/url]
and some discussion here: http://www.djiguys.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=708

Edited August 9, 2013 by flyfisher

[funkgod]

[quote name='flyfisher' timestamp='1376048931' post='2168996']
For a basic record of a band, almost anything will do a half-decent job in a 'home movie' sense. But for any sort of demo/promo work I reckon you'd need to record the sound separately because most 'affordable' camcorders have pretty limited audio capability and 'auto-level' inputs can result in very poor results, especially if the music has a lot of dynamics.

Video-wise, a big quality issue is their performance in low light conditions, although a noisy/grainy picture can sometime look good, again depending on the type of music.

As for editing software, I'm a bit out of date these days but the biggest issue when I was more into such things was the emergence of HD video and the complications arising when trying to do really accurate cuts in time to music. it's complicated to explain why but it's all to do with the fact that HD video is so highly compressed that each 'frame' of video doesn't contain all the data for that frame and it relies on knowing some of the previous data, or a 'group of pictures' or GOP. DVDs (mpeg) use GOP compression but HD video need more compression so it uses longer GOPs. If you make a cut in the middle of a GOP the editing software has to do a lot of reprocessing of the video data and can reduce the video quality. Different video editing software handles long GOPs in different ways. Depends how finicky you are.

Edit:
Some background here: [url="http://broadcastengineering.com/hdtv/editing-long-gop-video"]http://broadcastengi...-long-gop-video[/url]
and some discussion here: [url="http://www.djiguys.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=708"]http://www.djiguys.c...c.php?f=4&t=708[/url]
[/quote]


wow.... cheers, seems like a classic case of the further you dig into it the more complex it gets.
something with a clean sharp pic would be good i can add noise,grane, effects later if needed.

I have read that some with a hard disc is prone to glitching because of the vibrations loud music makes ??,
sounds abit far fetched to me.

Agreed, recording the sound separately seems to make more sence.
But read about one with XLR inputs the Panasonic AC-90. and got all excited till i seen the price !

editing software looks alot more to it than i thought

found some ideas here....
http://www.videomaker.com/forum/topic/need-a-camera-to-shoot-live-music-events

[flyfisher]

XLR inputs are usually the domain of semi-pro equipment or what used to be called 'prosumer'.

It's all out there, but move away from true consumer gear and it quickly becomes very expensive. Largely a manufacturing volume related thing I guess.

I only mentioned the underlying editing complexity because it might help to understand why there is such a wide range of pricing. The cheaper end of the market (perhaps even freeware) can make things easier for the software by only allowing editing cuts to be made [u]between[/u] GOPs rather than [u]within[/u] them. For the average home movie it would make little difference if there was, say 1/4 or even 1/2 second inaccuracy in the cut, but for a tightly synchronised music video it could make a lot of difference. But PCs are more powerful these days and multi-core CPUs lend themselves to things like background rendering when editing, so things may have moved on - but these are some of the things to ask about when choosing a package.

I've not heard about any music vibration-related problems with hard drive camcorders, but I suspect that most new equipment would be using memory cards these days, so probably not a big deal nowadays.

Edit: interesting link and probably a better source of info. Good points about stage lighting causing all sorts of problems for camcorders that only have automatic focusing and white balancing as they struggle to adjust to ever changing stage conditions. Basically the same issue for video as I mentioned above with auto-level audio recording. You really need manual controls for best results.

Edited August 9, 2013 by flyfisher