Don't even waste your time with a "webcam". I have a Sony handycam that I can plug directly into my firewire port and it acts as a webcam, but with the quality of a hand held camcorder. Also, very portable. And with the relative easy acess to broadband internet connections in all major hotels, your possiblities are pretty much endless.
I need a webcam for my site soon and need to know what is the best quality images and sound for webcam live shows for my site and my pc to use? Do I need anything else to add to this to make it top notch? And can I use it portable if I travel on a laptop? And What is the best camcorder that takes mini dvd or discs to record video? I want soemthing I can throw into my pc to upload to my site qucikly.
Thanks for your help!!
Angelina
Don't know much about webcams but I'm sure the folks at Comp-USA will point you in the right direction. As far as mini-DV, I would go with the best Canon you can afford. The optics are superb. The XL2 would be a good choice. With fewer bells and whistles, the GL2. Both do a good job. The next step up is a DVCAM for beaucoup bux.
All you need is a $15 wire to plug your camera once you buy it directly to your computer and youll be downloading in no time. I use a Sony Digital Handycam DCR-VX2000 to do all the shoot's for my web site, it's a great video camera, when it first came out was 3k, but got mine online for $1300 about a year brand new, may even be cheaper now, has a great Picture and many many options and can even take digital photos and store them on a stick which plugs right into the camera.
Don't even waste your time with a "webcam". I have a Sony handycam that I can plug directly into my firewire port and it acts as a webcam, but with the quality of a hand held camcorder. Also, very portable. And with the relative easy acess to broadband internet connections in all major hotels, your possiblities are pretty much endless.
There is so much to know, those here can only help scratch the surface. I've sent you a PM on the subject. I would discuss most of your interests with your current hosting service, if they cannot help you, you might consider finding another.
Good Luck Sweetie
Most of the web cams you are going to find at CompUSA or MicroCenter are not worth the time or effort. Winnov makes a few nice ones. From the way you describe it your best bet is going to be to get a good Sony or Canon digital video camera. They can supply the live feed for the web cam or used to load the videos to your web site later. Word of advice though, you said you want soemthing you can throw into your pc to upload to your site qucikly, that can be an issue since the files are going to be rather large in raw AVI or MPG format. You then get into an issue of how much space you have on your web server and your hosting agreement. If you want to PM me I can go over what all your options are so forth, don't want to get into a whole long techno geek speak explanation here. Bottom line, what you are looking to do is not hard, just has to be set up right and this is somethig I used to do (and host) for one of my ATF's out in Seattle before she left the business
Here are two articles on the topic.
http://www.tomshardware.com/consumer/20040910/index.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/video/20041008/index.html
1) The Quality of the WebCam is quite important is you choose to use one.
2) Video Cams can be used and here are some of the details.