We have been experimenting with consumer level HD video camera's along with our trusty MiniDV recorders with mixed results. Most consumer HD camera's are single chip CCD or CMOS collectors and have limited video processing on board. We have found that in low light situations the HD camera's have quite a bit of video noise in the recorded images. These camera's do quite well with higher light situations and not too bad with a large flood of IR light from portable side mounted IR lighting devices.

Another inherent problem is the AVCHD format that all video's are stored as. This is a Sony proprietary format which not many software packages support. Although I did find that Nero 8 and above seems to support the format fairly well. If you own a Mac, then MiniDV extraction is no problem but however AVCHD is not supported on a Mac.

I did some research and found that Sony does have Prosumer 3-chip HD video cameras for about $3,200 bucks that perform very well in low light situations, but not all paranormal groups can afford these camera's. We are looking into one of these for future upgrades to our tech.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

I have an update for the AVCHD format. Apple iMovie 08 and 09 supports the HD cameras and AVCHD directly from the camera although iMovie 08 will not import from the HDD but will from the camera. However, iMovie 09 will import directly from the camera and from a video archive which is essentially the copied files from the cameras HDD or flash memory.