I have a ton of video I need to get off tape, so I'm looking for a good program Mac or PC, I own both. Also how do you archive your video... what format? I'm mostly looking to archive my video.

I have about 5 mini dv tapes full of video over a span of 8 years. I want to store them on my NAS but I'm looking for a good common format. Something multiple programs can open and then format them as needed. For example, I rip all my music apple lossless and then I can create mp3 or aac files. I'm not worried about space.

Any suggestions to the format etc?

Simply import them into iMovie. It does a file transfer (not a transcode) on miniDV footage and will create files with the extension of .dv. These are identical to the footage on the tape. You specify where iMovie stores this footage, and you can then copy and move it to where you want. The footage takes up about 2 GB per 9 minutes of footage, so your 5 miniDV tapes should take up about 70 GB of space. I have probably over one hundred miniDV tapes stored this way.

When I imported these tapes via firewire, I also used the S-video output on the playback deck to capture and encode the footage using an iRecord Pro to .mp4 files, which are much more compressed. Your five tapes would take up maybe 6 GB in .mp4. However, 70 GB is no big deal, and it is much easier to edit .dv instead of .mp4.

Thank you so much David!

The best program by far for this is WinDV as it seperates each clip into separate files
files with dates in the filenames
WinDV (http://windv.mourek.cz/)