I have a problem, I wanted to know what would be the best choice to use for your first movie, miniDV, or digibeta. Now I have heard some good things and bad things about both, miniDV is good for a low-budget while digibeta has some pretty good quiality to it compared to miniDV, but, miniDV doesn't have near the quaility that digibeta does, I have also heard that if you shoot digibeta that it's only good for sale to DVD or video or tv, and not cinema. if you have any information to add to help me with a decision it will be greatly appriciated.
I'm certainally no expert, but I've got probably 10 short films under my belt now, and I'm currently working on a feaure. All along the way I've used a min-dv cmaera and edited on my home computer. While Mini-DV wont give you a Hollywood look, or the best quailty, it is a great cheap and easy way to start out making movies and learn your mistakes from. I read somewhere once that it costs about $.10 a minute to film with DV, $10 a minute for Super 8, $100 a minute for 16mm and $1000 a minute for 35mm. Mini-DV is very cheap and easy to use.
Well I know about miniDV, but what I want to know is, how is digibeta compared to miniDV
Digibeta cameras have better lenses, have a better contrast range if they're set up right, have twice the color samples of any DV camera, and record 10-bit or 12-bit color rather than 8-bit. So even if you're shooting with both cameras side by side, the Digibeta footage will look better.
However, you then need to edit: the Digibeta footage I've edited has been dubbed to DV anyway since DV editing is free if you have a PC whereas Digibeta editing requires an expensive system. After doing that, there wasn't much difference between the dubbed Digibeta footage and similar footage shot on a high-end DVCAM camera.
The plan in those cases was to go back and do a Digibeta edit if there was enough interest in the movie, but we never did that.
