My choice of hardware and software is unashamedly biased. If some of it seems like free advertising for the companies involved, it is because I find their products effective and useful. In a parallel universe, I might have bought a wintel machine and the list below would look somewhat different.
I use an apple power PC 733MHz G4. Before I knew really what I was doing, I bought this thing for one reason only: imovie.
Latest news is that I have a new dual 2GHz G5. Yes, it goes like a rocket.
As far as I can tell, this is the simplest and most elegant movie editing program there is. You take your apple, plug a firewire cable into the iDV port on your digital video camera and call up imovie. The rest can be learned in a few hours by following their tutorial. It really is that easy. I am a complete idiot with computers and I could do it.
An indispensible piece of equipment if you want to make a video. I used to use a Panasonic PalmSight miniDV camera. Model number PV-DV400D. I landed up with this particular camera purely by chance, but I grew to like it over others for one simple reason: Everything can be adjusted manually if you like. (It does everything automatically as well.) You will quickly find yourself in a situation where the camera is not doing what you want it to do. This is where manual adjustment is so important. Whatever camera you get, make sure you can override the controls manually.
Here is an important new development: I acquired a Sony TRV950 3CCD digital video camera. This was a serious attempt to improve the quality of the videos that we are offering on the webpage. The effects of using a good camera have surpassed my wildest expectations. The quality of the video has allowed me to improve my video compression for web serving by about a factor of 2. Not only do the videos look better, but the file sizes are much smaller.
Digital video cameras come in 2 basic recording formats:
You can never have enough of it. The faster things are moving the more light you will need. Out doors when the sun is shining is fine. For some of the high speed stuff I did indoors I was using about 2000 Watts worth of lights. (The movies of gliders on the airtrack for example.)
At some point you will come to realise that imovie is extremely limited in what it can do. Final Cut Pro is a very nice (and very expensive) package from Apple which allows you do to almost anything you can imagine when editing a video for streaming over the internet. The downside is that it is a vast and complex beast, more than one can hope to learn in a lifetime. It only works on an apple computer and unfortunately it is also essential software if you want to make a good quality video. But this will be elaborated on later.
Another essential (and expensive) piece of software (this time from discreet). There are versions for Windows and Macintosh available. On the upside, it is very easy to use. My Cleaner is devoted to one job only: making video files as small as possible. The problem is this: large movies take up too much bandwidth and take a long time to download. Especially bad for those of us who still use a 56kbps modem. Let's just say there is compression and then there is compression. More later...