Canon Vixia HFS21

I'm a 35 year old director who normally collaborates with cinematographers who own or rent the latest and greatest cameras, but last year I decided to purchase a camera for myself. Mainly because of seeing what people on this website were doing in their basements and on the spur-of-the-moment. I wanted to to teach myself one-man-band filmmaking, teach myself how to be a good video shooter.

I went with the Canon Vixia HFS100, a slightly older version of the HFS21, and have been really happy with it. The manual controls have been pretty easy to figure out, and as a tool for teaching myself the basic ins and outs of cameras you could do a lot worse.

If I had waited a few months, I probably would have got the Canon T2i DSLR camera, as that is the latest flavor-of-the-month gadget for one-man-bands.

So, to ramble a bit, you could do a lot worse than the HFS21.

The Cinemode feature flattens out the color spectrum, allowing you to teach yourself color correction in post.

Thanks for the reply.

Yeah I considered using a video DSLR for making videos since I already own a Canon T1i. However the T1i's video feature isn't too great. Though it has amazing quality, there are weird frames like 25 and 50 that I don't really want to use. Also it kills the battery life and probably causes some internal damages.

As an amateur I'd like to stick with a dedicated video camera.

that1guyy said:

Thanks for the reply.

Yeah I considered using a video DSLR for making videos since I already own a Canon T1i. However the T1i's video feature isn't too great. Though it has amazing quality, there are weird frames like 25 and 50 that I don't really want to use. Also it kills the battery life and probably causes some internal damages.

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25p and 50i are European standards Though I think the T1i only shoots 20p in 1080 mode, which is pretty useless. I would suggest getting the version of the model you've chosen without an internal harddrive - they use more power than flash memory, are more likely to break when dropped and stop you can't empty it out while carrying on shooting.

Personally I've got my eye on the forthcoming HFM400.

Supposed to be out in a couple of months, and it's got a much nicer price point than those S series cameras have.

Is there a variation WITHOUT on board memory? The difference between the HFS10 and the HFS100 was the built in memory and with the price of SD cars as they are it wasn't worth the EXTRA money to have the built in memory. Using the built in RAM means you have to connect your camera to the computer to download which is a pain anyway.