HDD Camera Recommendation? Help!

[lstdonsldr]

Hey guys, I'm on staff at a church in charge of our Video/Production Ministry. I am purely a Mac guy. Like most of us here. I have a JVC-HD100U with a FireStore I use for all of our video stuff. Works great. No complaints

Our Childrens Minister and our Small Groups pastor are both wanting to get small portable cameras for each ministry. I would like to get one that has a Built in Hard Drive or records to a memory card (SDHC), but am wondering which cameras out there work well with Final Cut Pro. I know one of the canons i looked at records to a memory card, but in MPEG2 format, so thats a problem. I want something that everytime i Bring it it, I dont have to Render all the footage to even look at it.

Our budget is $500 per camera.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks

 

[RatVega]

Probably the best solution is to just get the camera you feel is best suited and meets your budget criteria and just pre-process the footage using DVDxDV
or MPEG Streamclip to "rip" the MPEG-2 back to .mov footage. On any decent Mac this will be faster than a tape capture.

Both programs do a good job "back-converting"; I feel DVDxDV (I use the Pro version) is a bit better but MPEG Streamclip is free and handles a lot of formats.

 

[drpellypo]

Canon Vixia HF20. They are about £500 on ebay which is about $700. Not sure if you can get them cheaper elsewhere?

 

[Emilo66]

I would suggest u to go for Canon G9, They are reasonable in price with better picture quality. Check this out http://www.checkcost.co.uk/digital-cameras/c/4368
This may help u to narrow down your search and find the best deal.
Then you have this New Nikon D700, Nikon D40, Canon 1000D, They are also doing really great. You can read the reviews and make the best choice as per your requirements

 

[lstdonsldr]

clarification

I would suggest u to go for Canon G9, They are reasonable in price with better picture quality. Check this out http://www.checkcost.co.uk/digital-cameras/c/4368
This may help u to narrow down your search and find the best deal.
Then you have this New Nikon D700, Nikon D40, Canon 1000D, They are also doing really great. You can read the reviews and make the best choice as per your requirements

Im sorry, Im looking for a digital VIDEO camera, not just a digital camera