Barring good built-in sound equipment, look to see if your camera has the ability to add pro equipment, such as a hot shoe for a boom microphone or jacks for audio recording or dubbing equipment. And though it might make you look like a geek, it's rather important to check your sound levels with a pair of headphones or earbuds while you're filming, making any necessary adjustments, rather than get home to find your great-looking footage is inaudible.
Once you have your great-looking and great-sounding video "in the can," you'll likely want to move it to the box; either your television or computer. With the majority of today's camcorders shooting to Mini-DV this is easily done. And it's made even easier if your computer has Firewire capability. If it doesn't, getting a Firewire card will be worth your while given that, without it, moving hours of footage to your hard drive could take several more hours of waiting.
(A note on video storage: an increasing number of cameras are employing two types of storage, usually Mini-DV and one or another type of memory stick. This is because most carriers of camcorders want to be able to shoot still images that look as if they were taken with a digital still camera.) Traditionally, they didn't take these types of photos well.
And since many models use memory sticks or flash memory cards of a gigabyte or more, they can also hold several minutes of video that is also easily transferred from the camera to the computer. For this reason, you may want to look for models that are able to record video in more than format. Footage shot to Mini-DV can be several hours long and easily edited with most computer video software, whereas flash memory is great for shooting short video clips in .mpg, .wmv, or Quicktime format for attaching to e-mails or posting on your Web site.
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