Thank all of you so much for your generous and excellent thoughts and advice. In this case, the director is editing the movie himself, and has simply refused to use FCP, it's not negotiable, done deal.
He has also been against P2 as too risky; I may rasie the issue again.
We did consider using the Canon G1 or HV1 with a DVCPro HD deck, it still might be a possibility, the cost is right on the edge of what we might be able to afford.
The HDX or Varicam would seem to be ideal, if not for the size, which in the car would be prohibitive.
16mm is way beyond our cost, although I agree that it would easily solve all our problems.
We are going to be looking at the XDCAM 350, it might be small enough and be a huge jump in quality. In some ways, I assume it's competition would be the HDX900 (this is harder to rent, and one rental house offered the Varicam instead at what they said would be a comparable price.
We are not considering shooting SD.
The JVC is the wild card, recommended by many, but no one I know believes it can be edited on Avid, or possibly any system, for that matter.
The director is going to be editing this himself, and there is great fear about the workflow, such as a lowly paid assistant duping P2 cards at midnight after working 16 hours. I personally believe that Panasonic has been quite arrogant about the workflow, suggesting idiotic ideas like deleting 'bad' takes in the field, and deleting outtakes and trims after the project is finished. So it makes me feel uncertain when I can't trust the manufacturer to listen to listen to professional concerns. I fear pressuring the director and producer to accept this camera system, and then be faced with a scene, or (worse) a day lost because some hard drive got dropped in shipping or a file inadvertantly deleted. I am not worried about the cards themselves, but the transfer and saving and protection of the image after leaving the cards.
Any further thoughts would be welcome, thanks so much for that which has already been offered.
gratefully,
Steven Fierberg