Hey all, not sure if this is the correct section to post in as it's a fairly general question - I hope you can provide some advice.

I'm a hobbyist and have about 20 DV tapes (Sony VX2000) and 10 HDV tapes (Sony HVR-A1U) that I'd like to capture on my PC, primarily for archival purposes so I can sell the old(er) hardware. At some point I envision going through all of this footage and culling out a few hours of keepers, which can be later transcoded to a high-quality format.

My PC is a couple of years old (Q6600 @ 3GHz, 4 Gb RAM, SSD main drive, additional local and networked storage) along with Adobe Creative Suite CS5, running Windows 7 x64. I also have NeoScene v1.60 if necessary.

What's the best format to capture this footage, one that's fairly universal and likely to be easily read over the next 5-10 years? I don't plan on doing more than basic trim/split editing.

The DV seems easy, ScenealyzerLive or WinDV probably being one of the better options right?

The HDV footage from the HVR-A1U is the main concern. Should I just use something like HDVSplit and capture to MPEG-TS video (m2t files)? Seems like capturing using the Cineform codec would be overkill for my needs, and lock me in to a non-standard format.

Thanks very much for any pointers and suggestions!

Just capture the HDV footage to a regular MPEG2 file, you can always convert it to Cineform later if you need, but it will be a much smaller file in the meantime, and can still be directly opened in most apps. The DV stuff should be pretty straight forward, unless you want to compress it more, but 20 hours will only come to 250GB.

Even though HDV might be redundant in 10 years time, the NLE will still read the data stream. So the best option is to ingest the stream as is (MPEG-2) without any changes. This will save you space.

However, hard disks can go corrupt (and redundant too!), so you might want to keep that in mind. Hope this helps.

Thanks Mike & Sareesh; you've confirmed what I thought - just "copy" the DV/HDV footage using ScenalyzerLive/HDVSplit to keep it in the native format. This should be supported by most NLE software for a while.

Now on to capturing 50+ hours of footage; have local and network storage, and offsite backup all set.