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General discussion

Camcorder recommendation needed - live piano for youtube

Dec 18, 2010 8:47AM PST

Hi, I'm new to shopping for a camcorder, have never owned one. I want to make informal recordings of my piano music (classical) for youtube - high quality but not professional, nothing fancy. I know I want:
- external mic capable
- tripod capable
- easily transfer file to computer
- under $500
- good quality sound
- video quality less important, but decent

That's all I know of that I want. This is solo - I'll be setting the video on, then sitting down to play.

Discussion is locked

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I think you also want
Dec 19, 2010 3:00AM PST

manual audio control. Even acoustic classical music can be loud enough to over-drive most consumer cams' auto-audio-gain.

In your price range, the only ones I can come up with are not exactly "traditional" camcorders.
Alesis VideoTrack
Zoom Q3 and Q3HD

If you go this route, be sure to use LOTS of light when recording video.

And while you might be "going solo", there are ways to make it interesting. One easy way is to play though the piece several times and using the best audio. THEN play the piece several times using different camera positions. With a decent video editor (Sony Vegas for Windows; Final Cut Express for Macintosh) you can easily sync the different audio and video tracks, mute the audio tracks you don't want and transition between the various video "scenes".

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re: Camcorder recommendation needed - live piano for youtube
Dec 20, 2010 8:32AM PST

Thanks for your recommendation. The Zoom Q3 is really reasonable on Amazon, I'm going to give it a try. Seems like it has great audio.