Digital cameras: Looking for the Ultimate YouTube Rig

Looking for the Ultimate YouTube Rig

I am looking for a video camera to produce video for the Internet. The end result will be streamed or progressive download Flash (.FLV)

Right now, Flash video is the Internet format of choice, but most camcorders are DVD format. Unfortunately, DVD is very unruly for conversion. I currently record Gigabytes of data only to convert it down to a few Megabytes.

I realize that there may not be cameras that record video directly in the .FLV format, but I want to streamline the production process as much as possible. Starting with smaller MPEG encoded video in a .MPG file instead of giant .VOB files is a start.

Recently I switched to a digital camera (Sony DSC-T series) to record in MPEG format instead of DVD. This alleviates many of the NTSC conversion problems and gives me files that are much easier to work with.

The biggest problem now is audio quality because the low-end cameras feature only built-in mic's. The DSC T series does have one advantage: no motor noise since it records to flash memory.

Unfortunately, the DVD to Internet video conversion is not straightforward. First, there's interlacing versus de-interlaced, then there's frame rate, aspect ratio, resolution and data rate conversions. Since some of the divisions are fractional, it can easily go very bad.

I am looking for a camera with an external audio jack so I can use a Sennheiser wireless receiver. Whatever microphone(s) and mixing I do can be transmitted to the camera this way during recording.

A DSC T-series with an audio input jack would be a great, portable Internet video rig.

I could use the bigger DCR camcorders. The hard disk units look good, but the models with external audio are expensive and only produce tons of NTSC-mangled DVD data I don't need.

I thought of mixing independently recorded audio, but this again complicates the production workflow.

Since the data rates, frame rates, and file sizes for Internet (.FLV for now) video is so different than DVD and HDTV, and conversions often go so badly, I wonder if someone will produce a camera ideally suited to recording non-NTSC/PAL/SECAM video for the Internet while still providing necessary features like external audio input.