Does your laptop have a firewire socket? The only way to go is MiniDV as it gives the best picture quality over all the other types of camera (DVD, Hard disk, memory card). What spec is your laptop?, as video editing and creation needs a lot of 'muscle' to shift video and audio around and allow you to make smooth running films. You will also need a very large hard disk to store all the files on and as far as I'm aware laptops have tiny harddisks.

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