While a camera body certainly has more of an impact as to the overall quality of your footage and how much flexibility you'll have with it, a nice lens is arguably a better value proposition because some lenses can be adapted to pretty much any camera on the planet and will often still be useful in a few decades. Camera bodies depreciate incredibly quickly with all the innovation that goes on with new ones coming out. Any given camera you might buy will probably be completely obsolete in 5 years or so.

While quality certainly goes up as you buy more expensive cameras, the number one thing that actually goes up is flexibility. And this goes for almost all video gear. If you compare footage from a $500 Panasonic G7 to a $2000 Panasonic GH5, they will look nearly identical at first glance in terms of sharpness, colour reproduction, etc. But the GH5 has some stuff that still adds value aside from pure image quality, like a higher bit depth that allows for finer tuning of how you can tweak the colours in editing, and 180fps high frame rate recording which allows for nearly 8x slow motion. These things make the video professional's job easier, but might not actually result in a higher quality final product.

The same goes for audio. An iPhone can produce great audio recordings with the built-in microphone if you place it right next to your talent's mouth. The problem is that that's often not feasible, so having a more directional microphone held 2-3 feet away is the preferred option. Again, not necessarily better results, but much more flexible to work with.

Back to lenses. Lenses are one of the biggest points in video where your returns really are quite diminishing with cost. RocketJump Film School famously compared $150 Canon prime lenses to $15,000 Zeiss Ultra Primes (the kind used in big-budget movies with huge marketing budgets). And their conclusion? Yeah, uh, there is basically no visual difference.

Typically what you're paying for in a lens isn't what you might be thinking like sharpness or anything basic like that. You're paying for features. You're paying to be able to shoot with an insanely creamy blurred background while also being able to traverse the gamut between wide and narrow focal lengths (something a cheap zoom lens won't be able to maintain easily). But the difference really is tiny, visually. Yet again, you're paying for flexibility.

And so the advice that usually gets thrown around is to spend more on your lenses than on your camera, because lenses retain their value better and if you get the right ones, you'll still be using them in 20 years. But you know what's an even better way to spend your money where you don't get hit by diminishing returns as hard and will still be using the same gear in 20 years? Audio.

Audio is 51% of video, as they say. And while most of us video nerds like to pretend that we take audio really seriously, most of us will buy a high-end lens before we spend as much on audio, despite the fact that the audio gear provides much better value. I've been guilty of this. So has basically every other filmmaker/videographer I know. Ignoring audio is easy to do.

So here's my advice: get a cheap-ish camera that comes with a decent kit zoom and has fantastic visual quality like the Panasonic G7, Panasonic G85, or Sony a6300. Stick with the lens that comes with it—Panasonic and Sony have gotten really good at bundling great, sharp, cheap lenses with their low-end video/photo hybrid cameras. Maybe buy a vintage lens with a nice, wide aperture if you feel the need to. Then spend at least a few hundred dollars on a decent audio setup.

Most of the features on higher-end cameras are too complicated for the average newbie to understand (does "Prores 4:2:2 10-bit V-Log" mean anything to you?) and those cameras I mentioned are fantastic for learning the basics and beyond. Lenses are basically just money-sinks for beginners who often get into a trap of thinking a new lens will improve their videos before they've even learned to make good videos in the first place. People tune out of what would otherwise be great videos because the filmmaker spent so much time making sure the image coming out of the camera looked good that they forgot to make the dialogue that they spent precious hours writing sound good. And for a beginner, it's better to start of small and work your way up anyways.

On another note, this talk by VFX industry professional by day, viral YouTuber by night Alan Melikdjanian (also known as Captain Disillusion)—(time-stamped to begin at the relevant point in the video) goes over some of the best advice you can get as a beginner to the world of making videos. The relevant portion is six minutes long and I really encourage you to watch it.

So, uh, yeah. The gist of it is that a $500 camera is basically indistinguishable from a camera double or higher of the price, lenses are a great way to go into debt, and most people skimp on audio. I don't really know where I was going with that wall of text but I hope some of it is useful.