Digital video camera purchase recommendation needed

When I start a new iMovie, it asks what format and lets me choose from DV, DV widescreen, HDV 1080i, HDV 720p, MPEG-4 and iSight. When I choose HDV 720p and drop a regular quicktime movie which is AAC+H.264 in 720p (1264x720) at 24fps it imports it.

The import takes over five minutes to import and the resulting file inside the "My Great Movie" package is in 16 bit stereo sound in 48,000 kHz and "Apple Intermediate Codec" at 1280x720 at 30fps and has grown to 164MB from 15MB.

So, obviously iMovie will convert files known to Quicktime to the format the project supports.

After that, the clip plays just fine in iMovie.

So, buttuming that any convert time wouldn't be a lot longer than than the 1:1 import time of tape-based cameras, this wouldn't be much of a problem to me. But it's hard to say if the time would be lots more than 1:1 and a half-hour of video would take three hours to convert-import. In that case, maybe it's a bad solution.

Yeah, I've looked at that. The HC3 is a bit smaller and has some more features. But as far as I can see - it's not on sale in sweden yet, expected release is this month, so we'll see.

-- Sandman.net