Seeking serious advice

[bgd73]

Hello,
This is my first post.
A bit about me: My first pc was in 98, 2100 bucks for the latest, with firewire included on the board. Never used it. It got outdated,and burnt out. All I kept was this 700 dollar monitor that is still just getting videos worthwhile..
9 years later, I am ready to pursue some vid making as a hobby as intended. I was never so inspired until I took a low grade vid of my car, and it got wrecked making the vid quite a valuable tool!
Anyway, this is what I have learned and need advice about for high grade pc encoding (the cd /dvd stuff seems to be answered in my own mind):

• "720p" - the best I have seen aside from 1080p, and am not quite sure what it is. I have made it a target however. Fantastic quality on my pc, and when recording to a lower quality for web use, retains alot of that quality even on the crappiest of vid dump sites.

Will a "DV" camera record this quality? a cheap mpeg-4 camera good enough?
Also some software tips would be great for my windows based PC. I got all the free stuff I could, such as windows media encoder 9, and I dabbled with the moviemaker for basic things. I am ready to upgrade.Adobe stuff pricewise is still outrageous. Any help would be appreciated.

[celtic_druid]

720p means 720 vertical pixels, progressive.
Best DV offers is 576i which is 576 vertical pixels, interlaced and that is for PAL. For NTSC you are looking at 720x480 interlaced.

There are more and more HD cams coming out that can handle 24fps progressive though.

A cheap mpeg-4 camera would probably record in SD video format which isn't really mpeg-4. It is low res MS MPEG-4 in an asf container.

[anonymez]

Will a "DV" camera record this quality? a cheap mpeg-4 camera good enough?

A HD camera will, and they don't come cheap. A buddy of mine has one of these; lower end, but fantastic output.