We have just purchased our first camcorder. I think this going to be great fun! We bought a Canon ZR 850 and some extras to get started.
Now that I am retired, I want to try some fun stuff like making outdoor movies with my grand kids. My wife and I live in Wa. State, and we like to travel, and hike the outdoors. I want to produce some trail/camp cooking videos.
The one thing I have found with investigating the learning curve, is the amount of options are mind boggleing!!!! Thank God fo the internet.
I look forward to forum and getting different ideas from you folks.
Have a good one. Jim

Welcome to AVS Jim.

Do you have a HDTV?

If so I would highly recommend that you get yourself an HD camera.

There is a big difference compared to the MiniDV Canon you have.

You'll find that most of the threads in the Camcorder section deal with HD camcorders.

Lots of choices for HD cams now, so feel free to ask away if you decide to go that route.

I did a lot of reading on the different forums,and decided to do the learning curve on a sd machine. I am hopeing that with the BluRay issue decided the market may offer some better choice's in the middle price range.

I could use some help with video edditing SW for the computer.

Hi Jim48,

I was new to camcorders about a year ago. The learning curve is only a month or so. You can create decent DVD's the first couple times you try, but number of features you keep discovering in the software is amazing.

I still remember discovering "Wow, I can add a music track to this video!" I had no idea what these video editing packages could do.

I would highly recommend Cyberlink's PowerDirector software. Is pretty easy to learn and gives great results. When I was selecting software, I also looked at Ulead's VideoStudio package. It didn't seem to give as good a quality of finished product, but a lot of people seem to like it.

You can download both packages on a trial basis for free.

Hope this is helpful.