Hm, I think I should also mention me and my friend are participating in the 2009 Toronto Film Festival.

So basically 2 HD cams will be better than 1.

And The laptop for editing on the go, so we'll be running like 3 laptops.
(His PC laptop, his Macbook and the new laptop I get)

Basically, I just need to know what to get first.
Cam or Laptop.
I can get whichever one I don't get in March in May.
So I'm kinda leaning towards Cam in March, then in May when newer and better laptops come out I'll get one of those.

get the cam so u can get a bit more practice with it and also computers are out of date before you buy them so the later u buy it the less out of date it will be by the time u go on ur holidays
also might come down in price

Yeah.

If you are getting both in a relatively short amount of time - and you have a good desktop right now - I'd go with the camera. Gathering "footage" takes a long time, and to learn how to take good footage takes even longer.

If you want to get into video editting you'll need a new HD, 480GB is nowhere near big enough, you'll need a TB drive minimum.

Also, why do you keep posting non photography related threads in the photography section?

You'll probably find you'll need to upgrade the processor in your PC too if you want to do video editting, rendering frames takes a long time, especially when you're working with HD.

yes id have to agree if you want proper good quality ull need a massive hard drive.

yeah

I have a very good system and it STRUGGLES to edit 1080p footage...

Yeah, even rendering out 10 second clips of film from a DV camera takes a while on the imac's at college.

@ Veilside I have a AMD Phenom Quad Core 3.20 Ghz Black Edition Overclocked processor on my desktop with 6Gb of RAM and an BFG GeForce GTX295 1792MB Gfx card.

The Desktop would do the Video editing from the Camcorder, the Laptop would be used to photo editing.

Camcorders are related to photography as they take pictures, using multiple exposures really fast. (Basically like taking pictures and putting them together into a stop-motion animation, just much much faster)

I mostly Edit 1080p and 720i on my Desktop right now, So the laptop would be used for storage only until I can get it back and transfer onto my desktop.
(OR we might edit the film on my friends desktop, which is a Mac Pro 8 core with dual gfx card and 16Gb RAM)

:S dunno.
I'm pretty sure it's going to be HD cam first, then laptop.

good choice, just make sure that you have no compatibility issues with Vista 64-bit and your camcorder.