My folks own a real estate business. I'm basically the social media and marketing manager, but we're branching out now into making videos (pre-recorded for now, but we plan on moving into live seminars/webinars and vodcasts eventually). Now, I did go to Full Sail for film production about 12 years ago, but it was such an incredibly awful school I might as well be beginning this endeavor with zero experience.
We have two cameras we'll be using to record our seminars, a Canon Vixia HF R800 and an (old) Canon Vixia HF10. One will be used to record the speaker and the other the audience.
What I'm looking for advice on is a recommendation for mics to record the audience with (basically any questions they ask). We expect a maximum of about 20 - 30 people in a room size of about 15 x 30 ft.
I'm not sure if we'd be best served passing around a basic vocal mic or using something like a condenser mic pointed at the audience to record them as a whole. I'm also not sure if we can get away with using mics connected to the cameras (I believe only powered mics work with them) or if we need to record the audio with a computer or dedicated recording device and sync it all in post later. I'm not expecting to have a computer with an actual video capture card until we start doing live stuff, but I thought it might make sense to use a computer to record audio now since we'll need to use one at some point in the future anyway.
Basically, any suggestions would be great, either for actual specific mics we could use or overall suggestions in terms of which type of mics and recording devices to use / look for. We have an ideal budget of below $150 USD - I realize mics can get expensive and I've mostly seen recommendations of mics in the $300 - $500 range in my own research, but I simply can't get them to expand the budget by that much at this point.
Thanks!