If you want to take the plunge and have a go at video in your newsroom or to add another content string to your bow, you don’t have break the bank. Start small (and cheap) and you can try out the process before you commit to more expensive equipment.

Before looking at camera equipment you should take a look at your computer. If you are going to try video you’ll need a reasonably new machine. What you want to look for:

•Memory: It would be great if your machine had more than 1GB of memory.

•Connectivity: At the very least you’ll need a USB connector but you should be looking at a machine that has a firewire/IEE1394 connector (Sony calls it iLink). This comes standard on a Macintosh but you may need to get an extra card installed on a PC.

•Disk space: You should have at least 60GB free on your drive. You may want to consider some form of external storage. Look for firewire storage if you can but USB 2 storage is okay. Expect to pay around $150 for around 100GB of storage capacity.

If your computer is up to the job, just how much do you need to spend to get a working video set-up?

(Nearly) Free ($0 to $350)

Camera

Before you spend a lot of money on a camera, it may be worth looking in your bag. You may already have a perfectly usable video camera on your mobile phone.

Don’t think a cell phone is up to the job? Take a look at the Reuters Multimedia toolkit — it’s all based around a Nokia N95 smartphone.

If you’re ready to upgrade your phone, take time to review your prospective phone’s video specification. The only one to avoid? Apple’s iPhone. It doesn’t yet support video capture.

The N95 would be top of my wish list for the quality of video and all the other gadgets its offers (including Wi-Fi). But the N73 is a good alternative and it’s cropping up at a nice price ($349 at Target).

If you don’t want your phone to get any more complicated, then take a look at your digital camera. Most digital compacts will come with some form of video capture. My little Sony Cybershot records over 12 minutes of good quality video on a 1GB memory card. The camera cost me $300. If you think that seems steep, don’t forget you also have the capability to take a pretty good still picture.

Even with the huge leaps in the quality, the video you get from your phone or camera won’t stand up to that of a dedicated video camera. However, the video format is generally Web-compatible and you can even upload a video directly from your phone to your Web site with no extra work.

Editing

Whatever level you get started with video, editing is the difference that will set your work apart from a lot of the YouTube-type stuff that’s already on the Web.

Even if you only top and tail (removing the waste footage at the start and end of a clip), it makes a big difference.

Editing is never a simple process, despite what some will tell you, but it doesn’t have to be expensive. If you are a PC owner then Windows Movie Maker is already installed on your machine and it’s more than adequate for simple cuts and some pretty nifty graphics.

On the Mac you have the wonderful iMovie. Okay, the latest version (part of iLife ’08) has few fans but its still a great application.

Regardless of what you spend on your electrical equipment you should always have a tripod in your video kit. There are even plenty of mini-tripods available for still cameras and even cellular phones.

My favorite has to be the Gorillapod. It’s a flexible tripod, which means you can wrap the legs around an object and leave it hanging around. At around $25 for the smallest one it’s a great investment.

Even mobile phones have tripod accessories.

Challenges

The biggest problem with grabbing video using your mobile phone or camera is the sound. The microphones tend to be small and of poor quality and there is no way to connect a good quality external microphone.

Reuters got around it by working with Nokia to design a special adaptor for its multimedia kit. I’ve had some success using the hands-free kit that comes with the phone as a microphone. But the general advice is to is get as close as you can to the person speaking.

Andy Dickinson teaches digital and online journalism and is course leader for the BA Digital Journalism Production at the University of Central Lancashire. He can be reached at andydickinson.net. This article was first published at journalism.co.uk.