Budget is not my first priority. I am looking for a VERY VERY compact camcorder that I can take on my travels and not worry about the bulk that my old Handycam has (I cannot believe I would have ever of said that)

Anyways, I travel a lot so I do a lot of non-tripod video work as well as some stationary video. I looking for excellent Audio pick up as well as video. I will also be using this camcorder to download to my computer and edit them. The camcorder I am looking for would have an excellent picture and can be convertted to a viewable format on DVD as well as an editable format.

My computer can handle it as it was built for video editing.

Editing softwares I have looked at are Sony's Vegas 8.0 and Adobe Creative Master Suite. I am looking at taking videos and slowing down frames and scans that I did as well as do in picture editting for fuzzed shots.

The still picture aspect of my camera is pointless as I have a nice Digi camera for that. Tape size or memory card is not a big concern, however I think tapes are cheaper to buy in quantity and I do not plan on traveling with my external harddrive to download the videos to and I am not sure what my internet connectivity would be so storing them on the web is not an option either.



So in summary any suggestions for compact camcorders and digital video editing softwares would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

I am very happy with the Canon HV20. Picture quality is excellent, lightweight,real 24P for "movie like" shooting, cheap and reliable. Vegas seems to be the favorite editor for HV20 owners but so far I am using Ulead Videostudio 11 which is very easy to master and produces high quality DVDs and HD-DVDs on regular DVD media. My second option was the Panasonic SD1 , very light and small, great picture quality and one of the best lens (12 X optical zoom with the widest wide-angle). The new Panny comes with a not so good lens (10X zoom and not-so-wide-wide-angle). The Canon uses a traditional mini-HD tape and the SD1 records on high-capacity SD cards.

You can find a lot of good info here but in case you like the HV20 this is the best forum:

www.hv20.com

Sergio

any ideas on editing softwares? any other suggestions for camcorders?