Want your suggestion

[Bizoy Mahmud]

Hello
I am Bizoy, i am a film student. I had made few short films yet. Basically i used Sony A65 & Canon 60D for film making. In future i want to go in wild life filming. Right now i am making documentaries and for that i want to buy a professional video camera. My budget is near about 2 lac inr. I want to know can i get a good professional camera (body) in this price? if no then please suggest me about some camera which is suitable for filming.

If i have to increase the budget then how much i have to increase to purchase a good body?

Thank you.

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Which camera to buy?

The answer to this question will vary from person to person based on his or her present needs, expected requirements in future as well as aspirations.

Wild life is a big area and the requirements varies based on which small part you want to focus.

For example if you want to film birds, then even the longest of lenses will be short. For example while recently shooting flamingos, the closest I could get them was around 30-40 meters. If I wish to show just their head then it is not possible. For that I needed focal length of around 2000mm which is not possible. Simply getting to shoot at close to 1000 mm optical focal length resulted in shake and I had to be extremely careful and do some modifications to the platform. Will talk about that later.

If you want to shoot elephants in a safari in places like Bandipur, Nagarhole and even Corbett where you can see them close to the gypsy then a camera with a zoom lens from 24mm up to 200mm is fine. However, even in these places you will find some elephants far away and needing 500 mm to do a full frame shot.

Next question is who will be the client. That decides the type and quality of camera. If you need broadcasters then a camera with broadcast approved codec is required. Since you are starting now, I assume it will be mostly for yourself, so we need not focus more about codecs and all.

As a beginner, you should go for a video camera with a good zoom range. You can have a look at the Canon XA35 or XA30 cameras http://www.indiawilds.com/forums/showthread.php?17082

These are Full HD cameras.

There is also the Canon XC10 camera. One can also shoot in 4k in that camera. However, it has a fixed lens with 27mm to 273 mm zoom range. It uses CFast2.0 cards which are still costly, but the price is coming down. This camera is good for safari type shooting. However, there will be many situations where the zoom range will be too less if you want to shoot in a jungle.

The other Video cameras are more than your budget of 2 lakhs. Those are C100 Mark II (http://www.indiawilds.com/forums/showthread.php?15826 ), C300 etc..

Since you are starting out, may be you can just start using one of the HD camcorders and then when you are more confident that you would specialise in wildlife, then you can invest more.

[Bizoy Mahmud]

thank you so much for your suggestion sir