“I've been shooting with the Canon XH-A1 for a few months now and absolutely love it. A bit pricey, but I've been amazed at the quality. Had been using an XL2 before that and the A1 was a great upgrade. Works great with FCP and iMovie.”

“Thank you kindly for your comment. I will surely check that model out (and I like Canon quite a bit).”

“Hi Eric, left a brief message on Twitter but I thought I'd comment without the 140 char limit ;)

I've been using a Sony SR series hard disk based HD camera that uses the AVCHD format, it's been great not using tape. The only downside is the need to transcode the AVCHD footage in order to edit but on a Mac Pro it get's crunched pretty quickly. The Sony camera I used had a great super-slowmo mode where it would buffer a high-framerate chunk into RAM and then render it out at regular FPS so you get this awesome super slow motion.

If you want to work with AVCHD footage you need Final Cut Studio 6.01 or above, Final Cut Express 4 or iLife 08 to work with it. AVCHD is a compressed format but the quality is very good.

I fancy this camera myself actually: Panasonic HDC-SD5BNDL, records onto SD Cards rather than Hard disk. Probably better battery life than hard disk plus less moving parts!”

“I second not using tape. I roll tape, but record to a FireStore and haven't ever had to go to the tape safety. If you can get a hard drive camera or an external hard drive recorder being able to copy movie clips straight to your NLE is a huge time saver.”

“Hey Eric,

Most of the guys on the Platform Evangelism team here at Adobe (myself included) use a Canon HV20. It will also be the backbone for upcoming video content initiatives from Adobe that you'll likely see in 2008. The main reason we really like it is the hot shoe for accessories like external mic and lighting.

I've been using the Canon TX1 for a while before that. It's is very compact and has a great zoom. It also records to SD card, but HD (720) takes up a lot of space, so be warned. I generally get about 10 minutes per Gb of storage, so it depends on the type of footage you plan on capturing.

Last but not least, this month's Wired (talks about the quest for the 100 MPG car on the cover) has a few reviews on HD camcorders. Might be worth a look.

Hope this helps,
Kevin”

“Eric,

Did you see this?

http://www.macworld.com/article/131519/2008/01/camcorders.html”

“dimensionmedia,
thanks for that link - i didn't see that article until you pointed me to it. very nice stuff coming out soon!”