With the falling price of digital video cameras and the rise of PC video editing software, producing your own music video is definitely something most every musician can afford to do these days. All you need is a DV (Digital Video) camera, DV tapes, a location to shoot at, a PC, editing software (ala Adobe Premiere), and well, a band! Here’s some info and tips regarding the important pieces of equipment you’ll need.

1. Camera – You’ll be better off buying a DV (Digital Video) camera, they’re best for digital editing, later on. Decent DV cameras go for anything between $400 and $1200, and the tapes are around $8 a piece. One camera that I have used personally is the Canon GL2 MiniDV Digital Camcorder. I had nothing but good experiences with this camera. There are preset settings for the novice user, and at the same time it was very fine tuneable, for the experts out there. Make sure that your camera will shoot in progressive scan mode. Progressive scan is a particular method for displaying images, in which the lines of each frame are drawn in sequence. This will reduce the amount of flickering and increases resolution of the video you are recording. Most cameras come with microphones attached to them, but you probably don’t want to use the audio that will be recorded by the on-board mic as it will be pretty low quality. I suggest picking up a minidisc recorder, run all your instruments into a mixer that is plugged into said mindisc recorder.

2. Shooting – You can shoot your video anywhere, and hopefully you will take advantage of that fact! When editing your video, you will be telling a story. So varied locations would be excellent. If you can, storyboard your video out before you begin scouting locations or shooting. It makes thing 1,000,000 times easier, trust me. One other thing I would recommend would be to make sure that you have adequate lighting. Normal indoor lighting is not picked up by the camera the same way your eye picks it up. I would suggest picking up a book about the basics of video lighting, if you can. But if that is not a possibility, remember one thing, more is better.

3. Editing – You’re going to need to pull your video footage off of your camera onto your computer. Most DV cameras come with a USB cord which will allow you to do just that. You can use the proprietary software that comes with your computer to do that, or you can buy editing software which will do the same thing. Most PCs that have Window XP installed come with Windows Movie Maker. This is a great program for beginners, it allows you to pull footage off of your camera, and then edit said footage. But it doesn’t come with very many editing features. So the more advanced editors might want to plunk down some cash and buy Adobe Premiere, which is a super flexible video editing program with a very steep learning curve. The advanced Mac users out there might want to check out Final Cut Pro.