[Deer Hunter]

The advice that Badllarma gave in his first post is sound good advice.
I'm a professional cameraman working on wildlife and other documentaries.
As Badllarma said get a good camera to start with - it will save you money and perhaps even earn you money.

Wildlife filming is a very competitive market indeed, unless you are going to produce some cracking footage, and the only way to do that is with a decent camera and a selection of lens - you will not survive.

I use amongst others a Canon XLH1 together with a wide range of Canon EF lens including the 600mm. This combination produces some stunning footage - eye ball stuff!

Another very good point that Badllarma mentioned was the Tripod. Get a decent one to start with what ever your camera. Nothing worse than a tripod that blows around in the wind. I use a Arrow/Miller a very solid job

The other option and I now speak as a Canon man - the 5D Mkll still and video for the price of one camera!

I've just completed a short documentary, as an experiment I used the 5D Mkll, most shots using either 24-105mm , 70-200mm and the 600mm lens. The results are very good indeed. So much so that I was able to edit some of this footage into a documentary shot with the XLH1.