seeking <$1,000 H.264 camcorder for music performance

Hey friends,

I'm a musician/engineer in the market for a camcorder that can do videos like this YouTube poster without the heavy price tag of his camcorder (Sony FX-1)...

"GregsGuitar's Channel YouTube"

I'd like the following requirements in it:

.mov format
smooth and controlled zoom ability
a stereo Line in jack (or mic)
a headphone monitoring jack
a level adjustment for the line/mic in (very important)
SD card(s) up to 32G
excellent viewfinder
excellent capture in low light
excellent battery life
HDMI out
firewire transfer (not sure if this is superceded by another computer link technology)

Trying to keep it to under $1,000
These videos would mostly end up on YouTube but need the bandwidth for larger non-web based videos.

I appreciate all of your suggestions

thanks...

thanks Ungerman,

not quite the camera I'm looking for altough iFrame sounds like a good wrapper to work with my target editor (Adobe Premier)

Any others with less mushy looking video?

ok cool Paulo I'll check both out, thank you...

Initially I was concrened about any overhead AVCHS imposes and it started looking like .mov was just a more flexible albeit a faster format to use. I've actually used AVCHS before (JeffTaylorMusic dot com video at bottom was used for that).

But I could be swayed either way, I think, if the other listed items were met.

Although I wear an engineering hat during the day, I play music often enough too and when I record, the last thing I want to think about is signal to noise ratios, color saturation, and codecs...I want to play (!) so whether I put the camcorder on a stand or have a videographer handle the shoot, it should be fairly straightforward in use with dynamic results.

Yes, I'm in San Francisco