My old SONY Handicam is on it's way out the door. In addition to its age, the mini-firewire connector on it now has a bent pin so I'll have to do a hack job just to import my last footage. I'm at the point where I need to move to a more current camera to shoot video that I can import into iMovie and something that stays in the range of $400 until I can afford another upgrade. HD would be preferrable but it's more important to stay in my price range, so the most bang for the buck. Current footage is posted on http://www.youtube.com/sporkthis - I figure I can match or beat the video at my price range, but I need to find out what camera will do the job and let me cut half-way decent DVD and web footage for bands/indies on a budget.

I'm using a MacMINI which has USB 2.0 and Firewire capabilities. iMovie is fairly unforgiving on video formats so I'd rather import into iMovie from the camera instead of from a video file unless I know there's no need for prior conversion.

Thanks for any insight...