Originally Posted by Jim_Gunn

Forget any cameras that record to hard drives or DVDs. Like others have said, you only want to use a mini-DV camera and preferably a 3-chip mini-DV camera for productiton. Capture to pc thru firewire cable as a DV AVI file, edit in that format, then encode to mpeg-1, wmv, or whatever end user format you need. Save the raw footage on the original mini-DV tape and the project files from your editing app so that way you can always re-edit and/or re-encode the same movie with minimal work later.