Three years after I made this, the Panasonic G7 is still our main live stream camera.
Still under $300. You can find them used on eBay all the time. The image still holds up.
It's on every angle in our room except two. Our drum camera is a Marshall CV503, because that shot needs something tiny. And we run one Panasonic G85 as our mobile camera, because the G85 has in-body stabilization and the G7 doesn't. Other than that, it's basically the same camera.
It came down to a few things. How many cameras we needed, what we could spend, and which features actually mattered for a live stream. We landed on the G7 because it's cheap and the image is good, even though it's missing stuff that sounds important on a spec sheet.
We had a decision to make. Spend heavy on one or two nice cameras, or buy several affordable ones and cover more angles.
We went with more angles. That kept us around $300 a camera.
It's the same logic I apply to computers. Buy cheaper units and buy more of them instead of betting your whole Sunday on one expensive thing. When one goes down, you still have a service.
The G7 doesn't have in-body stabilization, usable autofocus for this, or great low-light performance.
None of that mattered for us. These cameras live on tripods and stay there. We don't set up and tear down every week, so stabilization is irrelevant. We set focus once and leave it. The room is lit.
Figure out which limitations actually cost you something in your room. Most of them won't.
Lenses for the G7 are cheap and easy to find. We run a mix of Panasonic lenses and adapted Canon FD lenses, which cost almost nothing and turn up on eBay constantly. That's a big part of what keeps this whole setup affordable.
We run dummy batteries in every camera. Battery life comes off the list of things anyone has to think about on a Sunday, and the cameras will run as long as you need them to.
Buy used on eBay. Bodies and lenses both. The G7 doesn't have every feature a newer camera has, and for a fixed live stream angle that doesn't matter. Put the savings into a second and third camera instead.
Buying the camera is the easy part. Getting a good image out of it is where most teams get stuck. Church Video Made Simple walks your team through exposure, white balance, composition and audio, so the people shooting on Sunday aren't guessing.
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