What I want, basically is footage clear and smooth enough to be able to see shots in flight, the camera to auto adjust for focusing at any distance and for changes in brightness, as well as being shock proof and not wobbling around everywhere and the sound clarity thing is a big thing for me, I want the video to sound like it sounded to me whilst I was recording it.
I think I've mentioned to you before that I'm a sound engineer, yeah? Well, whatever, I am lol! Let me just add some perspective here: You could use a £5000 dedicated audio set up synched to your video and it still wouldn't sound like it did when you were there. When it comes to built in microphones, you've got to bear in mind that the diaphragm is always going to be tiny (< 1cm tops) and a professional condenser mic has a diaphragm about an inch across made from gold plated polymers etc. Also consider that although your ears are less than a foot apart, to record stereo it rarely works that well to simply put 2 mics a head width apart pointing in opposite directions. On a camera, if it records stereo at all, the 2 mics can never be further apart than the width of the camera. It's obviously much more complex than that, but I'm sure you get the drift.
When I studied at uni we also did a bit of work with video, so i'll mention a few things that occur to me:
1) UK HD TV is broadcast is broadcast at 50
fields per second. Each frame is made of 2 fields, each of which contains every other line of pixel data, so it's 25 frames per second, the same as analogue TV. Feature films are recorded at 24 frames per second, unless there is a need for slo-mo. Basically, unless you want mega crisp slo-mo and are willing to pay the extra for the odd time you'll use it, you don't need 60fps.
2) I agree that head mounting is a better idea than gun mounting for video that you want to watch all of, but bear in mind that when you see shakey camera work in films/tv dramas etc, what you're really seeing is an expert deliberately adding precisely what the director wants, often with the camera, counter-intuitively, on a steadycam rig. What you're going to get is pretty random, because nobody holds their head bang upright for long and there will only be your neck wobble cushioning the jarring up down and side to side as you move.
3) It's the holy grail of film-making to be able to just shoot a subject and not have to edit it. The truth is that in reality "the story" of what happened, even while you were living it, does not happen purely in front of you. Of course there are things happening which you hear but don't see and, in theory at least, you could capture those sounds onto the film soundtrack, but I'm also on about your internal world. Human experience isn't just made up of what we get from our senses, it is also what we think about as we experience those inputs, so for eg we may hear something a fair way off and know that it means that the enemy are outflanking your position. How do you represent the frisson of fear/excitement that you feel? A sound panned hard left, say, just tells the audience that something has happened somewhere off camera to the left. Editing, score and SFX...
That's not to say don't have a go tho - check out various vids and find out what they were filmed on and what the sound set up was. It's amazing how you can get lucky with bits of amateur footage where it all just magically happens in the perfect conditions for that camera/mic and at a speed which is perfect for you to keep apace of... go for it mate!
