Originally Posted by PTravel

Couple of points:

1. Sports are high-motion activities. The higher the compression of the capture medium, the more motion artifacts you'll experience. The more motion in the scene, the more motion artifacts in a high compression medium. I'd suggest you actually try an AVCHD machine before buying one, as the arbitrarily-limited bandwidth results in very high compression rates and significant motion artifacts.

2. Shooting indoors is going to be an issue regardless of the camera that you buy. "Small camera" and "good low light performance" are mutually exclusive -- the smaller the sensor, the less sensitive the camera in low-light.

3. I think you mean "tmpgenc." Tmpgenc is a great product -- I use it myself for transcoding standard definition video to mpeg2. However, my understanding is that, though it will transcode HDV (and not AVCHD), it only burns DVDs, i.e. standard definition, and not HD DVDs (BluRay or HD-DVD). If what you want is to produce standard definition DVDs, why would you get an AVCHD or HDV camcorder?