HandiCams aren't really designed for this.  You're much better off with dedicated black & white cams, especially if you can augment this with at least a small amount of light directed at the target areas.  Black & white cameras are much better at seeing in the dark, and less expensive to make low-light friendly.

-Troy

I have five cameras currently from www.supercircuts.com each picked for the specific location. You want to match the lens to the location and supercircuits has a lens calculator on their resources page.

I have a color camera for the driveway and front yard and another for the front door. There's a black and white IR camera on the side gate. And finally a fourth color camera mounted ten feet above my roof which is soon to have pan and tilt ability and a black and white one in the garage covering my shop. They each feed RF modulators which are connected to the houses RF system so I can watch any camera from any television in the house.

If you go with a black and white camera you'll get 100 to 1000 times more light gathering ability, my IR camera is good down to 0.001 Lux where the color cameras need 4.0 lux. I went with color for the front yard and door because they're well lit with lights and the ability to see the color of a car or the shirt someone is wearing might help identify them. The side gate's IR illuminator does a good job of painting both my gate and my neighbor's side gates. I have microphones on the first two cameras to listen into the street and the front door.

I'm working on adding pan and tilt capability to the one mounted off my ham radio antenna using tiny servo motors like the ones you'd find on a remote control model airplane. I have them wired and nearly ready to go, I'm just waiting on the weather to get better to start running the wires.