buying a video-camera for piano-filming purposes

[stevie]

ok so for these 2 reasons i want a video-camera -

1 - to show off my insane piano skills amongst my internet buddies

2 - for my own personal amusement and to watch myself playing(educational perhaps)


ill only ever want to watch them on the computer, and id like it to ahve good sound and video quality

and i dont have a huge budget


advice?

[BoliverAllmon]

go to Louisiana and join the looters. LOL J/K

[leahcim]

Sound is probably the biggest issue.

Picture quality on the common or garden minidv / dvd consumer camcorders is pretty good - certainly better quality than you're going to share with the typical internet bandwidth available.

But for sound, especially music, well, just listen to a few on the internet. Your average camcorder will make it sound $%#$% awful and imho, defeat the purpose of recording it in the first place. Especially if you've got a nice piano. [Even worse many do it with digital pianos and electric guitars - and there's no excuse for that, you should only need a lead to get a decent recording from them]

If you want to record an acoustic - get a separate microphone for the camcorder. The built-in mic will be the biggest problem. That's the thing that'll make it a bit more expensive, but it's where you want to spend the extra imo - otherwise, pretty much any consumer camcorder should do.

For the capture / editing side, if you get minidv then a firewire card is cheap [usually cheaper than a capture card for analogue video] your computer might already have a firewire port, in which case you'll just need the right lead.

[quantum]

I agree with leahcim, If you want to be able to record sound with some degree of detail you should look into at least a higher quality mic for your camera. 

If you want even higher quality, you could record sound on a seperate audio system with studio quality mics and then join the seperate video and sound sources on your computer's editing program.  Studio Projects makes some excellent quality studio mics at very affordable prices, you may want to check them out. 

I've borrowed a miniDV camera before to capture a live performance and it took verry good pictures, plus the firewire transfer was verry straight forward.