Can anyone advise on a camcorder?

quidsinquentin

Hi

My son is after a camcorder for his birthday (he's saved up his pocket money and we'll do the rest). He wants to do animation with it, Wallace and Gromitt type stop-motion animation.

Can anyone advise on the type of camcorder or specs we should be looking at?

Cheers

QQ

albertross_2

Home use camcorders aren't really designed for stop motion animation, it may be easier to do it with a normal digital camera.

quidsinquentin

Why's that?

albertross_2

To do stop motion, you need to take one frame, move the models/character a bit, then take another, and build up many frames into a movie one by one.

Home use video cameras normally use tape to take video, at many frames per second, in one go. Stop frame animation is not something the average person in the street does, so there is no need to support this function on the average video camera, and it is difficult to support using the DV tape medium.

A digital camera (or the camera function in a video camera which normally uses a memory card), can be used to take one frame after another, and you can use software to combine them into a movie (25+ frames / second).