Why Do I Need a Digital Camcorder?

When I was a kid, my dad shot home movies using a Super 8 film camera. The movies themselves were about what you would expect: lots of cute little kids mugging about in a dark, shaky, poorly focused little film. Well, all that's changed. Thanks to today's digital video technology, you can now shoot your movies in high-resolution and edit them on your home computer.

It's quite amazing -- digital video recording lets you use your PC as a movie editing studio to create sophisticated home movies you can distribute on DVDs. If you're good at it, the result looks very professional, not at all like the Super 8 films of old. The key to successful digital movie making, whether you're making independent films or movies of your kids' birthday parties, is to start with a digital camcorder. Fortunately, now that older analog VHS camcorders have been relegated to the garbage bin (or to eBay auctions), virtually every camcorder sold today records in a digital format. Do you need a digital video camcorder? Obviously, I think so -- but read on to judge for yourself.

Make Your Own Home Movies -- or Independent Films

One of the key reasons to buy a camcorder is to make your own movies. So the question is whether you need to make your own movies. The answer, of course, is that it all depends. If you have young children, I don't see how you can get by without a decent camcorder. Whether you're recording your child's first steps, recording a school play or baseball game or documenting your latest summer vacation, home movies help you capture great memories. The nice thing about today's digital camcorders is that they're small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, so there's no excuse not to carry one around to important events. They're also pretty easy to use, which means that anyone can shoot some great-looking movies, no experience necessary. Just point the camcorder, press the play button and zoom into the action. Some higher-end camcorders feature image stabilization technology, too, so that shaky pictures are a relic of the past.

Beyond simple home movies, digital camcorders are a necessity for budding filmmakers. Today's professional filmmakers get their start with consumer-level video camcorders, which can be at professional-quality levels with today's digital recording formats. The very best camcorders feature 16:9 aspect ratio picture, interchangeable lenses, a variety of scene effects and high-definition recording. These camcorders are just like the ones the pros use, but they're available to regular consumers.

Edit Your Movies on Your Own PC

When you shoot in the digital domain with a camcorder, transferring your movies to your PC is as easy as connecting a FireWire cable. Once you've transferred your movies onto your PC's hard drive, the fun begins. It's simple to edit digital movies on your PC using a video editing program. These programs let you break your movie into individual scenes, shuffle the scenes around in any order you like, delete scenes you don't like and add fancy transition effects between scenes. You can move from scene-to-scene with wipes, dissolves, fades and all those other effects you see the pros use. And the nice thing is that all these transition effects are easy to add, in most cases with the click of your mouse.

Transition effects aren't the only special effects available, either. Most video editing programs let you add slow motion, rapid motion, pixilation and other effects. You can even make your video look like a scratchy and grainy old film, or blur the action to look edgy and hip. Video editing programs let you add titles and voiceovers and your own music soundtracks, too.

So which digital editing program should you use? There are a lot to choose from, and the most popular include Adobe Premiere Elements, Adobe Premiere Pro, Pinnacle Studio, Ulead MediaStudio Pro and Windows Movie Maker, which is included free with Microsoft Windows. They all import digital video movies shot with any MiniDV-format camcorder and let you create professional-looking home movies.

Share Your Movies -- Digitally

The final benefit of owning a digital video camcorder is easily sharing your movies. When you shoot and edit a video digitally, you can share it in a variety of formats. You can send a digital movie file to anyone else who has a computer and an Internet connection by simply attaching the video file to an email message. You can also burn your digital movies to DVD, and then share that DVD with friends and family. Once your digital home movie is copied to your personal computer, it's a snap to copy that movie -- either edited or unedited -- to DVD. You don't even need a fancy video editing program to do this since any DVD-burning program will do the job.

You can share your movies with the world when you upload your video files to a video sharing website, such as AOL UnCut Video or YouTube. All you have to do is connect to the Internet, go to the video sharing site and click an Upload Video button. Follow the onscreen instructions, and your digital video file will be online for any visitor to watch.

You couldn't do any of this with old-fashioned analog VHS video. But when your videos are digital, all of this editing and sharing is made possible -- and made easy.

Michael Miller is a writer and commentator on technology and digital lifestyle topics.