Hello,

New to the forum, but I hope to be a regular here.

I'm hoping to start making music videos, or to be more specific, short, 4-5 minute videos to recorded songs.

At first I was thinking a camcorder in the $1000 range, but I realize now that one for that price probably isn't good enough.

I want to be able to control a wide variety of features, including focus, zoom, quality, good lighting, and good HD. I've been looking at the Cannon GL2, and the Cannon XH A1. I'm relatively new to the game.. make that very new, but I don't want to buy an entry level camera, and soon after find out that It's not enough for my needs, and too "family-vacation" oriented. I want to make videos in music video quality that you'd see on MTV.

Can somebody throw some advice my way?

Thanks!

The A1 is a good cam.... 2 of them would be better....but you'll find that doing music videos is more about forethought and editing than anything else.

It's about taping HOURS of footage and having the eye to take the best of that footage and arrange it in such a way so that it tells a story that backs the music being played.

It's more about art than shooting.

Here's a new one from Ray of Underground Planet who won the 2005 Austin Music Network Music Video Awards (BTW... he shoots with a couple of Canon Xl1 cams)

http://www.vimeo.com/3339998

A little blurb on Ray and the 2005 awards:
http://hollywoodindustry.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=31394

If you want to be any good at this then you need to get yourself a fairly pro-ish editing app... and you need to know how to use it. Ray uses Sony Vegas Pro:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=641059&Replies=31

Stay away from the avchd/avc cams. With the amount of footage that you'll need to edit... the h.264 codec is just too much of a problem in an editor.

Thanks a lot man!

I'll definitely look into those links.


And if anyone else has any suggestions, please, keep them coming.


On a side note, the videos I plan on making aren't your standard artists playing guitar/singing to synced music, but rather themed videos, usually with city scapes, images etc, without the artist.