I am very new to camcorders. Here is what I need:

1. Need to be able to shoot sports (swimming) from up in the stands indoors with flexibility to zoom in on particular athletes.
2. I plan to shoot short clips of races (usually 30 seconds to 10 min max in length). I intend to keep them on my hard drive.
3. I will be emailing the clips to friends and family.
4. At times, I will edit the video and merge shots from multiple races together perhaps creating a dvd.
5. I would like to be able to freeze frames so that athletes can see their stroke and the image is not blurry.
6. I do not want to mess with tapes and prefer flash memory and/or hard driver recording
7. Want decent image quality.
8. Would prefer to spend less than $500.

Please recommend something for me! Thanks.