[billspreston]

I rented an HV20 and shot some video and thought the camera was really nice, you made a good choice - don't return it. If anything return the HV30 and see if you can find an HV20 for cheap, they are basically the same camcorder. I'm on a Mac Pro running Final Cut Pro to capture off of miniDV, but for PCs I've heard of people using Premier for editing and then using Vegas or After Effects for color correction and the such. For transferring data to your computer, you'll need an IEE 1334 4pin to 6pin cable (mini Firewire) & a Firewire port - the included mini USB cable is worthless. I would also venture to guess you need some more RAM to edit @ 1440x1080. On my Mac Pro with dual xeons & 8GB of ram rendering is still pretty slow and frustrating so be prepared for similar results. Perfecting your workflow will be a bitch, but once you have it down you will be set to go (obviously). In my case, I had to deinterlace/convert my 24p footage to properly edit it, so be weary of this if you are shooting in the 24p cinemode. Without the deinterlacing, final cut was having serious problems with cadence and my videos would come out choppy whatever I did. After I de-interlaced everything went smooth. Cinemode is really nice for color correction btw. The image won't *look* as good as the other modes when you are shooting, but you get more image data to work with in post - kind of like RAW but not really haha.

I have no idea if any of this helps you, but I thought I would share my similar experiences with essentially the same camera. I would scour the HV20/HV30 forums and search for PC workflows and see what other people are doing. That's your best bet.