I had lots of problems getting material from consumer SD-card camcorders or digital photo cameras into MC. Especially importing or converting full HD files took forever, if it worked at all. Now I use a Western digital WD-TV Box (around 80 Euro) to play back the files and a canopus ADVC HD50 (700 Euro) to convert the hdmi signal to hdv. It even converts between 59.97 and 50 Fps (though not very good) and works in realtime. It does not support all audio codecs but there is still the chance for a new firmware...

Thanks for the suggestion.