What is the minimum camera requirements to create professional quality videos? We are hiring videographers and we noticed that some of their videos have colors that appear extremely far away from accurate color reproduction as well as highly pixelated/grainy quality despite 1080p resolution. It reminds me of my old cellphone cameras where it has a low megapixel value and it would end up very grainy.
It was most likely that they used wrong compression or a wrong file format or it because they had bad equipment to begin with. We are looking for professional quality videos similar to the one shown below where it has good color accuracy and the video looks HD with no flickering and pixels flying around:
Taste Show Video
Budget constraints are taken into consideration as extremely high end camera equipment is probably too way off the budget. What we are looking for is a good enough camera that can reproduce quality similar to the sample video shown. It is very difficult to have an idea of which camera can produce quality videos given there are a lot of options in the market and first hand experience is needed to tell if it is good or not. But there may be a criteria that video production people look for to know which equipment can produce quality videos.
The camera only plays a part in what makes a good, clean image. The most important parts are Lighting, Lenses and Knowledge of the person operating the camera.
If you film in a dark location and have to crank up the iso, you will get noisy images even with a 20k$ camera. If you have proper lighting and use a low iso, a 1k$ camera can look really clean.
I understand that you are looking for DOPs to work for you. If their reel leaves a good impression, ask then which camera they used and what gear they would recommend to shoot your project. Many social-media clips are shot with cameras such as the Sony FS7 or even the Pocket Cinema Camera in some cases. These are relatively affordable cameras (compared to feature-film equipment) and are certainly capable of creating images such as the ones you posted.
Don't be cheap on lenses as well. A 20k$ camera will look worse with a 50$ lens, compared to a 2k$ camera with a 750$ lens.
Usually, it's the DOPs job to recommend and pick out the equipment they use. If they insist on 20k$ worth of gear and claim that a slick production is impossible otherwise, maybe look around some more. However, do listen to their reasons when they recommend expensive gear as it might actually be reasonable and in your favour.