what is the best cheapest equipment to buy for making home video?

Answer 1

First of all, what ever you do, DO NOT get dvd cams if you plan on editing them later (or anytime at all in your life), as they will drive you insane. If you just plan on shooting and watching, then get one, otherwise, get a miniDV cam for best quality and ease of editing. Newer ones can use USB to transfer video to a computer although firewire is still preferred and sometimes the only way. If you dont have a firewire port on your computer, you can get an adapter card for around $50 for a cheap one. If you have xp, movie maker is free, OS X, you have imovie. If you have vista, you have that new program (shoot, I forgot its name, it can burn DVDs, but dont use it to). Oh, and youll need a firewire cable as well (movie maker only recognizes firewire, i think imovie as well). So at the cheapest, you could get a $300 miniDV cam, a $50 card, $5 cable (ebay), a dvd authoring program ($30-40, nero is a good one), and blank dvds ($10 for a 20-pack). So all in all, about $400 (although if you have a firewire port, you dont need a card obviously). BTW, firewire is also known as iLink or IEEE 1394, so if your computer says anything like this, then you dont need a firewire card. Hope this helps!

Answer 2

It depends on what quality you're looking for and what your finished product needs to be. If you have a DVD burner already in your computer and you have Movie Maker (comes installed in WinXP), then all you need is a way to record. If you already have a camcorder, you need a way of getting those movies into your computer. You will need something like a Dazzle converter.

If you don't already have a camcorder and really want to do something cheap, Aiptek has some pretty good camcorders for around $100-$150. They record either internally or to a memory card which you can then transfer movies from using a card reader or USB cable.

For better quality movies, I use a Sony DVD camcorder (around $400 and up) and Pinnacle Studio ($80) for editing. My DVD burner (external Sony dual-layer) cost around $100.