Looking for suggestions on workflow/equipment: daily production of short presentation videos

Question

i am looking for any and all sort of suggestions on workflow and equipment, specifically camcorder choice.

Case details:

We are producing short videos every day. A person is standing in front of a big LCD TV and talking to computer pre-generated graphics. The recordings are generally one minute long. This is shot in a really tiny room, with two tungsten video lights that we already have in place.

After recording, the material needs to be taken to a room 200 meters away, and slightly edited in Sony Vegas on a Win 7 PC, before being rendered to some sort of delivery format for our customers. typically "mp4". We are shooting and/or delivering in either 1280x720 or 1920x1080.

I will be needing a camcorder, and some sort of lavallier mic, and a means to connect them. I am thinking of a lower end prosumer HD camcorder, maybe like Sony HDR-PJ810 or Canon Legria HF G25.

A DLSR could maybe be slightly cheaper, but are there any benefits? The "film-like" ideal that is prevalent with DLSRs today really isn't a goal here - we'd rather want long DOF, than shallow.

• How would you go on and set this up, considering it needs to be done on a daily basis, and preferably by one sole person? (the presenter is doing the recording)
• Is there something that can be done to avoid having to take an SD card out of the camera, and run away with that each day? Any practical network solutions that won't be twice the price of my camcorder?

Cheers

Answer 1

There are camcorders that enable full-res uploads of their memory cards via WiFi. Thus, if your room has connectivity to your intranet, you can leave the card in the camcorder, hit upload when you are done, turn the camera off when the upload is done, do your customer edits and uploads, then wipe the card for the next day's work, all without walking 200 meters away.

This $330 camera might do all you need: Canon VIXIA HF R60.

But any camera with WiFi upload capabilities will do--it's just a question of features, color matrix preferences, and cost.