Thanks Luis,
Wow, that was a great disection of the info.
I am in trouble because I do not have aprox 11 or 12 gigs left.

I have a MAC (with 20 gigs free)that is running iMovie but iMovie does not let me burn a CD in 16:9 format and view in 16:9 format. So, I will have to buy an external hard drive for my PC which is running Pinnacle.

Thanks for the great info...Now, if I could solve the "streaking" on the XL2 I would solve another issue. I have these rectangular bars appear as I pan to the left or right. Don't know why this happens. I was either in 24p or 60i....

<<<-- Originally posted by Ed Bicker : ... So, I will have to buy an external hard drive for my PC which is running Pinnacle. -->>>

Be careful... Thar be dragons lurking in them parts. If you go with a USB drive, only USB2.0 holds any promise of handling the bitrate. If you go Firewire, you may run into conflicts, either because the software thinks you're trying to hook up two cameras and refuses to play nicely (this happened to me with Canon's DV-PC software), or because your hardware can't handle the combined data rate of reading from the camera and writing to the drive via the same Firewire interface.

To hedge your bets, I'd suggest getting something like the Western Digital Combo external drives, which support both USB2.0 and Firewire. It costs a bit more, but it increases tohe chances you'll get something to work.

A 250gb external will hold about 18 hours of DV.

-cw-

<<<-- Originally posted by Ed Bicker : Thanks Luis,

I have a MAC (with 20 gigs free)that is running iMovie but iMovie does not let me burn a CD in 16:9 format and view in 16:9 format. So, I will have to buy an external hard drive for my PC which is running Pinnacle.

-->>>

The most recent version of iMovie does indeed support 16:9 (as well as HDV). http://www.apple.com/ilife/

Consider FC Express if you are heading to more serious editing, and maybe a SATA disk instead of FireWire.

Bw

Sven