Video camera?

I put a whole music video using Mac's free iMovie. Later I tried professional Final Cut Pro; to be honest, iMovie seemed to me much easier and intuitive.
My video was very appreciated by the band, who said it looks more professional than they guy's they hired to do it. We put it on web and it was shown on TV. The song is currently on 5th position in charts, and I think video helped a lot :) The cameras were one Canon and two Nikons (D3300 and P310), both not highest grade.
 
Panasonic video cameras are good. I have an HDC100. But if you are using an older Mac for editing (mine is a 2006 iMac running OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard), the computer will not recognise the camera's file type, suffix .mts. You'll have to mess about with file conversion software, 'Handbrake' for Mac is open source free and used by at least one pro whom I met, but even that doesn't always work
 
I put a whole music video using Mac's free iMovie. Later I tried professional Final Cut Pro; to be honest, iMovie seemed to me much easier and intuitive.
My video was very appreciated by the band, who said it looks more professional than they guy's they hired to do it. We put it on web and it was shown on TV. The song is currently on 5th position in charts, and I think video helped a lot :) The cameras were one Canon and two Nikons (D3300 and P310), both not highest grade.

I rarely do moving picture but I'm a mac guy too and found the same thing as above.
iMovie is clearly designed to be intuitive and straight forward but I had pretty big issues with low quality output and posterisation. Is that a word <-?

Even doing simple stuff like slideshows from stills, blacks would come out all posterised. Google seemed to suggest that this is just an unavoidable thing with iMovie due to the codec being used?
My memory blows but it might only apply to making DVDs.

Anyway, just a headsup, anytime I have to make a slideshow DVD for someone, which is surprisingly often, I use final cut or premiere pro.
 
Hi, I am not sure about the output. My video was edited and outputed in 1080p in iMovie, so no compaints, actually there was an option to go to even higher resolution, which I rejected because of ridicularly big size of final video (5 GB or so). I didn't use stills though; for them you will need to make a very high resolution graphic to get high video resolution, I guess. Maybe the stills were not of good quality originally? (or high resolution?)
 
Stone Jack, post your video. I'd love to see it, I'm sure I'll learn something and/or get some ideas.
 
i live and work in Asia, so this is not English speaking video. And this is my first attempt either, so please be patient with my effort.

The song is about spring, someone waiting for Spring to come after long winter.
The band's name is Ray of Light, song is Spring.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xbBdw-Ueyo

I did the scenario, editing, some directing. Shooting was done by another person. Software was iMovie.
 
I enjoyed StoneJack's video (vision and audio). The video moved along nicely, with many interesting camera shots and angles. Editing was tasteful and thoughtful, and the black and white treatment worked well . . . it does a good job of providing continuity and cohesion. What made it different from Rami's was that it embedded a story, and it is the story that keeps the watcher engaged, wondering what is coming up next.

It's also the story that is the hard bit (for me) to create. But it doesn't need to be complicated. It just needs to give a sense of "this is the start, and this is going somewhere".
 
i live and work in Asia, so this is not English speaking video. And this is my first attempt either, so please be patient with my effort.

The song is about spring, someone waiting for Spring to come after long winter.
The band's name is Ray of Light, song is Spring.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xbBdw-Ueyo

I did the scenario, editing, some directing. Shooting was done by another person. Software was iMovie.
Wow! Man. That's really awesome. Love the black and white. This looks like pro quality to me. Music sounds great, too. Thanx for posting that, Stone. :cool:
 
thanks for nice comments! I am much aware of shortcoming and limitations, but thanks for kind comments!
BTW, the melody of the song is mine as well. Arrangement/recording was done by pros in studio.
The black and white was planned from beginning, i love black and white videos. I am planning to do an another video, black and white with some colors, my next project.
Mastered Final Cut Pro for that for months, thats a powerful program, to be honest, much more effects and transitions.
 
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If you're willing to spend the higher end of your budget, like around $300, you might be able to get a DSLR which can change lenses and will give you a much better overall quality than the Canon PowerShot ELPH 340 HS Digital Camera.
 
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