I may buy my first HDV camcorder. I'm considering Sony's H1, A1, H3. I intend to capture unedited HDV video into FCP 5 on my G5 Mac for editing. Since we currently don't have a way to burn high definition DVD's for viewing on our HDTV's, it seems the most convenient way to watch my personal edited HDV videos for now would be to export the edited Final Cut Pro 5 HDV sequence back to the HDV camcorder with no quality loss. Then I would connect the HDV camcorder's output to my HDTV for viewing the edited video.

Is this possible? I have heard opionions that FCP 5 can't export HDV video back to the camcorder over Firewire, but I've also heard that it can. Does anyone have experience with this? I have a Mac dual 2.0ghz with 2 gigs of RAM, so my computer SHOULD be capable if both the FCP5 software and Sony HDV camcorder are able to play nice.

You should't have any problem printing to tape. However you cannot use firewire to send previews of the timeline to your camera to view on an external monitor as you would with regular DV. I think that's the limitation you've head of. Instead you have to either use FCP's Digital Cinema Desktop function on a second computer monitor or else purchase an expensive HD capture card for a monitor output.