Hi, I am thinking to move from 8mm and Beta to digital, since I want to edit the movie with my PC.

I am thinking to use the Sony DVD camera, since the quality is pretty good for Internet films festival. What would you think about such idea ?

Well I guess the first question I would have is what sort of budget are you on?

Well, the issue is not the budget, rather time and quality -vs- the budget. If I need to rent a digital beta or HDV I would do, this is for a shorts, 2 days shooting in Tokyo, therefore it won't be expensive anyway. I could rent the cam, then transfer from tapes to CD/DVD and work on my PC at home with Director.

But I want to shoot with a small handy camera, since it would fit the script (need to be very close to the characters, ....) and I want to know if a DVD handycam would be enough.
The target is to broadcast the movie on the net, not really sending DVD/tapes to live festival.

Does anyway have experience with such hardware ?

If you have any intentions of doing any editing then DVD cameras are the wrong direction. They record directly to MPG which is a highly compressed format and bad for editing. The DVD cams are for home users who want to pop out the DVD and play it directly.
You need to look at mini-dv which is minimaly compressed AVI and is the preffered format for most editing programs. Look at the editing areas on this board for more info.

Thanks, I have little experience with digital so it helps.
I was thinking to use the SONY HDR-FX1 of a friend as a second choice, so maybe this is the best camera to use. The DVD is a convenient option, but I did not know that is was much more compressed than tapes...

While the FX1 is a great new camera, if you shoot in HD you have limited editing (read expensive) options, and any way your final DVD does not support HD yet. So if you do choose this way you will either shoot in standard def or down convert when capturing. Spend some time on the FX1 forum and the editing forums to get some idea as to what to expect.

Thanks for the support, I have spent some time on the forum. The move from film to digital may not be as difficult as I thought, specially since I used to do lot of Computer Grpahics and worked with Beta a few years ago.

Talking to the co-prod in Tokoy, I finally use DVD handycam, since our main target is to broadcast the 8minutes movie ovet the net and to participate to Net festivals, not live festivals.

cheers

Best of luck Richard.

One other point with regard to your selected toolkit. You mentioned Director for your edit software. While this is a fantastic program to bring all of your elements together in one interactive way, it is not an editor. Director takes your finished audio, video and stills that you have compiled and as you know, works it's magic. Great program for creating a shockwave site once your video file is complete.

Start with an NLE program, get the footage into the computer just as you would for higher res delivery, and export out the format you require. The DVD cam appears nifty at first glance, but it is not a tool for what you want to do. It is strictly for vacation video, birthdays etc.