hdmi on my HDC SD1 Panasonic camcorder and MACBook Pro fully loaded

Elgato offers EyeTV boxes that are able to capture HD via Firewire. Check with their selection from http://www.elgato.com/

I am pretty sure that the HDV they refer to is the new generation of HD DV cameras not AVCHD.

HD DV is captured through a process of transcoding to a temporary format in slower than real time. This device ( your link is dead as a smelt) presumably does that faster.

The big problem , not atypical of Sony, is that the format is newer than any editors for AVHCD. Even Sony's own Vegas is marginal.

Had you searched here or well, anywhere really, on AVHCD you'd have learned it is uneditable. Hope Final Cut or something else adds a AVHCD codec or process in the future.

I am not sure the Elgato link is an appropriate suggestion, if it is, Abrody should tell you what device. I am not sure any are intended to capture HD video and get it into a mac. I have the Eye 250, it only accepts composite in and the rest of their devices say nothng about HD inputs.

EyeTV has a hybrid digital HD TV recorder:

http://www.elgato.com/index.php?file=products_eyetvhybridna

Of course whether you can get the digital signal off the camera into any of the Elgato products without first converting it to analog is the big question. Your best bet is to write to support AT elgato.com and they may be able to tell you if they have a solution that works for your needs.

I had one. It records off air HD by antenna and it broke the first day. It is really flimsy. The breakout box will input standard 480 composite (and S) video and that's it. Not HD. NO firewire, No HDMI, nothing.

They promote the input to let you watch video games on your laptop. Low-D I guess.

Elgato's products ( I am very happy with the 250 which has a hardware MPEG-2 encoder chip) are better defined as TV tuners, allowing the mac to become a PVR for cable or off-air signals.

In other words nothing to connect a AVCHD camera's output which I guess may have HDMI (no idea) to the Hybrid. If you output composite video there is no point in recording HD right?

Bill, take it back and if you want to shoot HD get one that uses tape and use iMovie or Final Cut/Express. iMovie HD is a great product.

Keep in mind you have no ability to output HD to a DVD to actually play it yet but you can send back to the cameras and play the edited movie from the camera to the TV.

Really the quality of DV (plain old DV) is so very good it would be adequate for quite a while.