Please recommend an HD Camcorder for me....

[CoreOne]

Hi, can anyone help recommend an HD camcorder for me? It can be a regular camcorder or pocket camcorder, whichever you recommend based on the following...

Budget: Cheaper is better, but not an issue.
Purpose: Will be recording amateur basketball games for film study and also doing unrelated news stories and interviews.
Features: Must be able to record at least an hour without recharging. Must also be able to easily upload to laptop for editing! I was considering the Flip Ultra HD but I read something about how it's impossible to upload to your computer unless you have a 3.0GHZ processor or better?

Also, some of the will be broadcast on TV so the audio must be good enough for playback on TV...

Thank you so much.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

I read something about how it's impossible to upload to your computer unless you have a 3.0GHZ processor or better?

Most consumer cameras use AVCHD to encode their footage, which is a highly compressive codec, thus the CPU needs more power to decode the video.
But if you want to edit the footage, you should transcode the video to an editing format anyway, iMovie and FCE/P will do that for you. After that process, the CPU is hardly used during playback.

Other than that, I don't have any recommendation for a consumer camcorder.

 

[alph45]

Budget: Cheaper is better, but not an issue.

This isn't actually a budget, so your primary constraint has no parameter.

As was noted, raw footage is almost always transcoded to an edit-friendly format.

 

[benhollberg]

I don't know how well this would work for handheld but would work good for mounting for a basketball game but I would check out the GoPro HD cameras.