I have been recording our high school girls soccer games using my old Sony Digital 8 (DCR-TRV350) camcorder and then creating DVDs directly from the digital 8 tapes using Sony’s standalone DVD burner. The HS soccer games have 40 minute halves so for each game I use two 60 minute tapes and wind up with two DVDs. Quick, easy, and almost hands off operation: no titles, no editing – just the game as I taped it, mess-ups and all. The coach has been using them for instruction - playing them on the schools ordinary DVD players.

I’d like to do better. I’ve been reading about the Canon XH A1S and if I got it right, it records only onto Mini DV Cassettes in something called an HDV format, and It looks like a dandy camera! But the tapeless recording of the Panasonic AG-HMC40 and Panasonic AG-HMC150 in the AVCHD format onto inexpensive SD, SDHC cards seems really efficient. I’m afraid to rewind, erase and reuse tapes, so the cards to DVD could save a lot of money in the long run - even using dual layer DVD blanks.

I am restricted to producing DVDs that will play on any regular DVD player. (The school won’t be buying new PS3s, Blue-Ray decks, or anything else to accommodate something special that I might do. )

My thought is to get a good Prosumer HD camcorder and record each game at a very high quality; edit it on a desktop computer, and then somehow compress it down to the best quality MPEG2 that fits onto a DVD or a DVD-DL so that the coach or anyone else could use it. Would that work? What software would I need to use? It seems like it should it be easier to work with the AVCHD format on the SDHD cards than the Mini DV cassettes – but I get the impression that the AVCHD format is complex to use, and so the reverse is actually true. Thoughts?

What you have today is a streamlined, nearly effort-free workflow that produces standard-definition results.

What you will have after you buy an HD camera, work out an editing workflow, and find a way to get it to DVD will be a bumpy, high-effort workflow that produces standard-definition results. (And you'll be $1k poorer.)

Also, remember that formatting the memory card and re-using the DV tape are the same thing - it's just that you have to rewind one of them. You need a comprehensive data plan in place regardless of whether you're using tape or tapeless.

(Also, I'm quite sure this is in the wrong forum! :-))

The advantage of the tape is that it is a reliable storage for the original footage. Tapeless systems are practically easy to use but not as reliable for storage. Hard drives fail frequently, optical disk media are vulnerable to scratches etc.

Yes, in terms of archival storage reliability , at the present moment its one step forward and two steps back. Hard drives will fail, opticals will scratch and back up to digtial tape storage is very slow and expensive. ;-)