I need hands free filming but yet still get a good quality video for a home made movie during deployment. Will be editing and piecing together footage. Wanting to make something to be proud of. All I know is that the camcorder has to have an A/V input for the helmet cam. What do you all think the best set up is?
If you choose your model with some care, you should be able to buy a mini-DV camcorder that has the facility to record analogue audio/video through an A/V port. You can then connect your helmet cam and film live. I'm assuming that the helmet cam also has a mike built in. Of course, the quality won't be as good as filming DV, because of the analogue capture stage.
Make sure you get a camcorder where you can continue to record analogue while the viewfinder is closed, or it will be very unwieldy to use. Also, if you are planning a lot of vigorous action while filming, it might be worth checking out the shock and vibration the unit can handle while recording. Those data might be hard to pin down.
By the way, one problem you will encounter is that the helmet cam is very unlikely to have anti-shake built in, whereas almost all DV camcorders do. The camcorder won't apply this feature to AV recorded via the socket - at least I don't think so. Which begs the question: if you got a very compact DV camcorder, could you strap that to a helmet?