"soundhaspriority"

HD editing on a laptop is not here yet, except for very small stuff.

By that you mean what? HD video editing software
is abundant. USB 2 connection should easily handle
HDTV streams ( 55Mbit/s or 11% of what USB 2.0
offers). A notebook with two USB's (mini-me to
notebook/ HD camera to notebook) should cover it,
no?

This chart explains:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win...HDFormats.aspx
If you are referring to HDV, then modest disk bandwidth is all that is
required. However, there are now fairly reasonable cameras that record
uncompressed. This is what all would-be film makers want. HDV has
unacceptable motion artifacts for critical work. According to the chart,
uncompressed HD in the popular 720p requires 332 megabits/second raw
bandwidth. It is surprising how protocol and latency up the requirements.
The actual number is usually determined by experiment on a workstation.

In any event you can still off-load UBS/firewire to the
notebook. But as I noted previously it brings up the
complication of audio synchronizing in the video
editing program. What video editor are you using now?

What "film makers" type HD camera, for example,
are you refering to?