What is the best format for a camcorder?

What type of Camcorder format should I buy?

• I want to buy a Camcorder for my own personal use, but I want to also use it for video recording at my church. I want to know Which video format (such as, MiniDV, Digital8, Mini-DVD, Built-in hard drive, or Memory cards) is best for Burning the recording on to a DVD.

• Answer:

  The previous answer gives great advice, but I have to disagree. Through my experience, miniDV is by far the best. I would consider going with hard drive camcorders, but miniDVD or memory card camcorders aren't even worth your time. MiniDV beats out hard drive for several reasons: 1) Better Picture quality: All consumer cameras compress. So its not a matter of whether they compress, but how much. When shooting in HD, I have found that Hard Drive, DVD, and memory card cameras compress A LOT more than miniDV. 2) Compatibility: MiniDV camcorders are compatible with virtually every editing program out there, including professional programs such as Avid Media Compser, Final Cut Studio, Adobe Premiere Pro, as well as the crappy default programs like iMovie and Windows Movie Maker. Hard Drive camcorders offer several options such as Sony Vegas, Final Cut Express, and a few others, but not nearly as much. DVD camcorders are very limited. Either put up with the software that the camera comes with, or purchase the decent, yet not impressive program, Ulead Video Studio. I don't know about flash drive cameras, but that's because I never bothered to look into them. 3) Storage: MiniDV offers much easier, cheaper, and more reliable storage than Hard Drive cameras. First of all, miniDV camcorders record to cheap, 2$ miniDv cassettes, meaning you could archive your original footage forever. With Hard Drive cameras, once the hard drive is full, you have to capture the footage into the computer, then delete it from the camera before recording more. Of course, you could store the originial footage onto hard drives, but that's still more time consuming and not as reliable: hard drives can crash! Regarding your second question, if you want to edit your footage, then burn to DVD, don't get a DVD camcorder. They are the hardest to edit. Also they are a totally different file type. In order to convert it to the standard .avi file that can be burned to DVD, you'll need to rip the encoded files from the DVD to the computer then re-export as an .avi file. Either miniDV or Hard Drive camcorders would be fine for DVD burning...I still like miniDV better though. Well, I hope that helps....and I apologize if I sounded a bit biased (but it's true, miniDV owns!). So have fun and best of luck! ....oh and btw: most professional cameras use miniDV, apart from the expensive solid state cameras such as the Panasonic HVX200 and PMW-EX1, which utilize even more professional formats, but that's an entirely different story.