Video recording camera for events

[Doctor_JohnSmith]

I'm looking for camera and lens recommendations general school use. Example uses would be for recording plays or events, in a variety of lighting conditions, and often from a distance away, sometimes up to 100 feet. Anything from a stage play to graduation ceremonies, to student video projects. It would also need to be usable for livestreams, such as the aforementioned graduation ceremonies. The resulting footage needs to be good enough to be edited later. I don't have a set budget, I'm looking for suggestions before formally making a proposal. 4k would be great, anything over is probably excessive. A long battery life or external power source would also be great. Recommendations for a tripod that is sturdy and allows smooth camera movement would also be great.

 

 

[Skipple]

Your budget is going to play a large roll here. What are you expecting to pay? 

[Doctor_JohnSmith]

Ideally $2k ish or less. Cheaper is an easier sell, as long as it does what it needs to do.

[creat0r]

On 1/19/2024 at 5:56 PM, Doctor_JohnSmith said:

I'm looking for camera and lens recommendations general school use. Example uses would be for recording plays or events, in a variety of lighting conditions, and often from a distance away, sometimes up to 100 feet. Anything from a stage play to graduation ceremonies, to student video projects. It would also need to be usable for livestreams, such as the aforementioned graduation ceremonies. The resulting footage needs to be good enough to be edited later. I don't have a set budget, I'm looking for suggestions before formally making a proposal. 4k would be great, anything over is probably excessive. A long battery life or external power source would also be great. Recommendations for a tripod that is sturdy and allows smooth camera movement would also be great.

 

 

The Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K (BMPCC4K) is great. It has fantastic 4K video quality up to 60 FPS, clean full sized HDMI output for live-streaming, it comes with a power adapter to drive it from the wall, it has good fans inside to keep it cool so it doesn’t overheat even if the shoot is many hours long, it doesn’t have a recording time limit, and so on… It has a very easy to use UI and one of the largest built-in screens relative to its size. For audio it has great preamps and XLR and 3,5 mm input, also great built in microphones a headphone jack for monitoring the audio in real time. It also has many useful more advanced features that you can use if you want to like shooting in LOG and BRAW (allows you to change ISO and white balance in post). You can buy a used BMPCC4K on Ebay for around $700 USD, but you should also buy a Samsung T7 SSD with 2 TB (or more) of storage since the cameras records onto external SSD via a USBC port and produces large files. This still eaves you with a lot of money for a good lens for the camera, and luckily micro4/3 lenses are relatively cheap. Downsides of the camera is that there’s no autofocus or automatic exposure, but for ceremonies and events on stage you usually just set the focus distance before the shoot or want to adjust it manually, autofocus can be annoying if it starts focusing on the wrong things.

[creat0r]

Velbon Videomate 638 is a great tripod for the price, I’ve been using mine since forever and it’s fantastic.