Help on purchasing a dvd camcorder to work with imovie

hello out there...was wondering which camcorder that has a dvd burner works best with imovie and osx...i want a sony, but i thought the small dvd's did not work on osx. presently, i have a digital8 and use a firewire connection to ingest video for editing with imovie. thanks for any help...

... boxes that holds DVD and hard drive recorders:
These files are intended for "one time" captures.
The file format is not intended for editing.
I totally agree with your recommendation: try to avoid DVD and harddisk camcorders at this point if you plan to edit on a Mac. Not only is software support seriously lacking, those Mini-DVDs don't even work with slot-loading drives that are common on Mac's.
But... there is nothing wrong with the MPEG-2 compression used on DVDs. Just look at HDV: It uses the same MPEG-2 compression to fit the the HD video into the space of a SD MiniDV tape. iMovie converts HDV video streams during capture into a format that is easier for editing - that's why the files on your harddisk are 4 times as big as the data on the tape. The quality of video captured by most consumer camcorders is more limited by the optics and the video sensor (in particular indoors, with less than perfect lighting), than the recording format and media. And yes, you can edit MPEG-2 just fine, it is just more challenging to get it working right.
I used to tell all my friends to stay away from DVD camcorders, too, but then broke down and very reluctantly bought a DVD camcorder recently. It's mainly used for recording music lessons, with instant and repeated replay. It took me some tinkering to work out a good workflow for editing with iMove. I did some side-by-side comparisons with a similarly priced MiniDV camcorder (Canon DC50 vs. Sony TRV-33). Overall, the video clips were almost identical from either camcorder, with the DVD camcorder producing slightly better video in some situations. But as I said in the beginning, that is probably mostly a result of the better video sensor and the optical image stabilization in this particular model.
So how does my workflow go:
- Use DVD-RWs, formatted in Video-VR mode, and prefinalized. This allows
you to pop out the DVD from the camcorder at any time and immediately
use it in your DVD player or computer without another time-consuming
finalization step.
- Find a Windows PC to copy the video files from the DVD to my Mac.
Mac OSX cannot read the filesystem used by Video-VR discs without
additional software like Roxio's Toast (which I don't have). Besides, all
my Macs are slot loading.
- Convert the clip with the Quicktime MPEG-2 plugin and MPEG Streamclip
to DV format.
- Finally, import the clips into iMovie.
Workable yes, but neither convenient nor esay. Stick with MiniDV.

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