Monroville said:
Is there any way just to order it from the american website and have it shipped to the UK? Even with a 6% sales tax, it shouldn't come out to more than $636.00. If you have someone over here you know you can trust, if Amazon.com doesn't ship to the Uk someone here could buy it at the cheaper price and then ship it to you. I know that's a big risk, but $636 is a lot better than essentially $1009.85 (at least converted through xe.net)

Also, I take it that the US version is locked at the 24fps rate, or can it be altered between different frame rate settings?

well i had been thinking about that but it really isn't viable for me to do it this way. for one it can be a nightmare to transfer the warranty from the US to the UK and if anything went wrong i would be stuck with a dead machine . many large companies refuse to do humour and American warranty in the UK. Then there's the chance that i get heavily taxed by customs but the main thing is that the NTSC version suffers with the jerky footage when using the 24p mode. The PAL version does suffer with this problem. The thing is that the NTSC machine runs at 30p & 60i. For cinema mode it records at 60i then converts the footage inside the camera in 24p cinema mode which causes the duplicate frames or applied pulldown because 60 is not divisible by 24. now the PAL machine does 25p cinema mode. the cameras main setting record at 25p & 50i. Because of this no extra frames are added so this results in smooth motion. It would be too much hassle trying to figure out a way to remove the duplicate frames from the NTSC model to be able to use the footage. Plus the voltage differences for the power supply is also a problem between our 2 countries.

The Pal machine purchased from a UK company is the only viable option.

I've got down to needing just slightly under £200 to get this machine now. i'm hoping i can get it pretty soon because the place i was going to purchase from have gone down from 6 left in stock to just 4 in less than a day. i guess it being much cheaper than anywhere else means that it isn't going to last at that price for much longer

in regards to me shipping out the workload for the models etc to save money it really doesn't cost me that much to build these things as i have most of the materials i need around the house anyway, plus i love making stuff anyway.

First thing i'm going to do when i get the camcorder is film the new wampa so you can all see what its like and post the first making of video. i'm using my old crappy camcorder to film the step by step building progress of the wampa puppet for this then the finished puppet will be filmed with the HD camcorder and you'll get to see the complete new scene