Looking to buy a camcorder..thing.

[stray]

Too bad you can't replace the hard drive in it. 30GB is kind of dinky (maybe four hours --- but for traveling, you're going to have to accessorize it with a laptop, with, preferably, an external hdd.....Unless you expect your travels to only net you 4 hours of footage).

Secondly, while I might suck Sony cock elsewhere, you'll be stuck using Vegas for that thing (because of the proprietary 264 implementation used by Sony). Perhaps by the time you actuallly get it, you'll be in better luck --- But even Sony's own support just happened recently. It'll be a bit for others to do something.

Not trying to hate. Just a head's up.

AVCHD is not proprietary in the sense something like UMD is. It's a joint specification between Sony and Panasonic and they are licensing it out to other people. Editing it is still a pain right now but almost all the major video editing vendors have said they will be supporting it.

Yeah, I didn't mean to make it sound that restrictive.

AVCHD will probably be the way to go eventually, but it's pretty early for something like that now (also, I may have been wrong about Vegas -- I don't think even that has support for it yet either).

You can always convert the files, I guess (without loss, into a standard 264/avc format). Perhaps the conversion process won't even take long (seeing that they're roughly the same). It's just silly to have to do so ([EDIT] And will still cost you).

[SnakeCharmer]

I *love* the idea of a HDD cam.  But my worry was, as Stray pointed out, travelling.  We're fairly active and travel a good bit, and I don't see that slowing down as he gets older.  Most of our family is 3-5 hrs away, also adding in regular vacations and whatnot.  Our travel and (most definately) our activity level will increase pretty dramatically; whether it's ball games, going on ski trips, whatever.  Lugging around a laptop with an external HDD really isn't an option. 

Is the HDD able to be pulled out and replaced with a secondary one if it's full?

I'm thinking that over the long haul (at least the next 3-4 years) a DVD/RW one would be the best option, storage wise, but wonder how well those things write when being jostled around a bit.  I'm actually going to buy it through my business and use it as a write off :P, so that's why my budget is where it's at. 

[schild]

About 99.99% sure that you can plug any USB Drive into the camera and dump the contents to a folder on the drive, all configurable from the camera. You can get a 250GB drive for traveling that's smaller than 5-6 MiniDV tapes.

[SnakeCharmer]

If I can go direct, without having to go from cam to laptop to HD, then hell yeah.  That'd definately work.