This may have been covered in the sticky at the top, but it isn't specific to my situation. Please bear with me.

I recently got hired to film/edit a year-in-review type video for my college and they are supplementing with a decent budget to do so. I asked around for advice on what I should spend the cash on. I'm running with a good G4, a canon GL1 and GL2, and i'm pretty set as far as knowing what video software i'm going to purchase (Final Cut Pro for sure, still deciding on Boris FX red and Magic Bullet).

It was highly recommended that I buy a deck so as not to wear the heads out on my camera, which makes perfect sense. I'm looking at something like the Panasonic AGDV1000 of a Sony DSR-11. What I really want is reliability and good quality without breaking the bank. (Me and every other consumer). These are the models I have seen most often while cruising websites.

Are these quality units? Is there some other model out there I haven't heard of? I'd like to keep it under $2000, which is why the other 2 models were so attractive. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Nick.

IMO... you don't really need a deck. Just get a cheap consumer miniDV camera to use for capturing if you're worried about head wear.

The decks have some minor advantages over consumer cameras (more so with the $15k+ decks)... such as more robust correction for dropouts and proper 7.5 IRE setup on the analog outputs (the DSR11 doesn't do either AFAIK). But you really need a very high volume of work to justify that IMO (or need those specific features).

2- If you ever need to deal with HDV, then you're better off had you bought the consumer camera.

Thanks for the advice, however, I'm going to spend the full budget one way or another, and i'd rather it be on a decent deck that's going to last than a beater of a consumer camera. Isn't there a major difference in quality between a deck and and a camera?

There are much better things to spend your EXTRA money on, like additional audio equipment etc..

The deck or the cheap camera will just read 0s and 1s, that's it. The deck may actually last longer, but you could buy 6 or 7 cheap cameras for the same money and they would out live the deck.

M

Thanks for the advice. Will just any cheap camera with a firewire port work?

Yes, any MiniDV cam with a firewire port will work.

Since all the camera will be doing will be transferring data from the tape to the comp's HDD, it really doesn't matter what kind of quality you get. You might want to stay within the Canon family, though, in case of freak compatibility issues.