Warning - long response. First - if you have a good rental house nearby I would strongly consider renting for your for-hire work unitl you get a good sense of what cameras you like and how their workflow works out for you. That's what I'm doing right now - there's still a lot of upheaval in the low to mid end HD production field and things will keep changing rapidly. The fallout from the introduction of the RED camera is going to change things drastically.
That said, here's my take on the sub-10k cams I'm familiar with. You'll note very little Sony or JVC mentioned - I used to favor Sony's stuff, but they've fallen way behind in this field in my view. JVC makes some very interesting midrange cameras, but I am leery of their For 24P in standard def/DV you are pretty much limited to the absolutely excellent Panasonic DVX100 (or its more expensive big brother, the HVX200, which also does HD once you add pricey P2 cards - see below). For pro for-hire work I still try to avoid HDV except for projects that are primarily interviews or other material that won't have a lot of motion. The Canon HDV stuff does a better job than the other brands on avoiding motion artifacts and blocking it seems, but you're going to be delivering on DVD, h.264 files or an HD DVD / Blu-Ray pretty soon for many clients, which means putting that long-GOP mpeg2 transport HDV stream through not only color correction and whatever other image processing and compositing but ANOTHER pass of temporal compression. That said, I know others who are using the the higher end Sony and Canon HDV cameras for professional work. If you go that route, the HX-A1 is a great value. If you want 24P in HDV, Sony has one model, but it has pretty crummy low light performance. Canon's prosumer/professional HDV stuff does 24F, which is kind of like a 24fps version of "frame mode" on the XL1 and GL1 - doesn't have the res of 24P but it has the look and can be treated as true 24P in post. On the lower end - while I adore my little HV20 as an everyday personal cam and even for my own filmmaking, it lacks the support you really need for professional audio in the field (unless you're doing double system sound), and is going to make most clients a little uneasy since it looks and feels like a very cheap consumer camera. It's 24P feature requires some extra steps in post as it doesn't carry the cadence flags other 24P video equipment uses. The picture, once you learn to get full manual control, rivals its more expensive brothers and sisters though. It's the best consumer-for-pros secret weapon cam since the Sony TRV900, but it's not something to build a production business around. IF you can afford it and are willing to learn the workflow of using P2 cards and no tape, the HVX200 is NON-hdv HD camera for the money, does multiple frame rates, and uses dvcproHD instead of HDV for compression. Basically (though this obersimplifies), its a native 16:9 HD version of the DVX100 (it will also do DV on tape). But once you get the cards and the support stuff it is more expensive than the high end Canon and Sony HDV stuff. There's a lot of talk about it only resolving 540 lines and the interpolation it uses. I should also repeat here three mantras I always tell my students: 1) Never buy anything until you are ready to learn it thoroughly and use it regularly immediately. I work with so many people who got themselves "fully equipped" and then, two years later, find themselves facing obsolescence or incompatabilities once they are ready to really learn and use. 2) Never WAIT to buy something you need right away due to fear of something better and cheaper coming out soon - it's not worth the missed opportunity. 3) A skilled and talented artist or craftsperson can get professional results from almost anything. An unskilled person will not do any better with a CIneAlta HDCam than they will with a cel phone camera. The person is at least 95% of the quality equation. The equipment is secondary. FWIW, with apologies for my habitual lectury teacher-tone, Brook _______________________________________________________ Brook Hinton film/video/audio art www.brookhinton.com studio vlog/blog: www.brookhinton.com/temporalab
