Budget video shooting

[directedition]

I'm shopping around for a passable inexpensive video camera. I'm basically down to this kind of selection: Low end digital, or high end analog. People keep telling me that any digital camera will blow away any analog camera when it comes to video quality. But I must insist that a 3CCD professional BETACAM camera will be much better than a Panasonic PV-GS2. Of course I can't afford a BETACAM camera and much more likely to be looking at a 1/3" single-CCD S-VHS camera. One thing important, I believe, is that older cameras also have much better manual controls. Zoom, focus, shutter, white balance, and individual audio channel balances are right at my fingers and not buried in a menu system.

Does anyone have an opinion on analog vs digital for the cheap student video maker?

 

[MarkG]

An old Beta SP camera that used to cost $20,000 will almost certainly be better than a new DV camera that costs $200. But for the same price, DV is almost always going to beat any analogue equivalent; there's a reason why most companies, at least here in the UK, abandoned Beta SP long ago for DVCAM or Digibeta.

Also, editing analogue will be a real pain since you'll need an analogue capture card and probably won't have timecode control from your computer. I wouldn't touch it myself unless I was offered a very good deal.