Which camera within a budget

[lightsource]

Hi all,

 

I'm looking to buy a couple of cameras, mainly to do fairly low budget music vids in SD. There are a couple of things I'm interested in though....

 

The ability to work with SMPTE timecodes, and the fact that I also want to do SFx shots, processed with software such as Maya, 3DFx and Inferno (all Autodesk products), so, there will be a bit of green screen action as well.

 

Shoot single frame at a time, ie, stop motion animation.

 

The budget is about £800 to £1200 (ex vat) per camera, and I'm prepared to look at the used market if it's a viable option.

 

Any recomendations appreciated.

 

Edit to add.... Not looking to buy now, but over the next few months, so what's for sale now on Ebay and Mandy etc, will be gone by the time 've got the finances.

[sleepytom]

Blimey your not asking for much then?

 

 

 

Really your buget is way too small to get anything which is usable in a proper multicamera environment. You need to spend 10x your budget to get features such as genlock and remote timcode inputs. £1200 certainly won't get you a professional camera with these features, unless you get something really old like a BetaSP camera. (I can't recomend going for analog video in this day and age)

 

£1200 will buy you a secondhand Sony PD170, or a secondhand Canon XL1s. Both these cameras have long histories as reliable low budget cameras which have been very popular with short film and music video producers. Niether of them support remote timecode though. More seriously none of these old cameras are true widescreen recorders meaning that any 16:9 production that you do will be noticably poor quality.

 

If widescreen and timecode sync is really that important to you then find more money and invest in the Sony HVR-V1 - this will shoot widescreen (HDV) and uses a sony specific system to syncronise multiple cameras. You can find the V1 for around double the price you were hoping to get your cameras for.