Probably been answered b4, if so let me know where, but:

Shooting to tape on 2 Z1s and an FX1 we will film approx 20 hours of footage.
We have a G4 powerbook with 1GB RAM, FCP5 and a 250GB External Hard Drive.

Suggested workflow?

I think: Firewire camera to computer, through FCP to external disk, but what should we use (DVC Pro HD/SD??) to make it all fit on 250GB and keep as much data as possible?!

Clueless newbie grateful for advice!

Thanks!

I think you will probably want to keep everything as HDV because the files will be smaller. You would have to convert to DVCPro which would probably be time-consuming on a G4 and take up much more space (would end up with both the original HDV and DVCPro).

I did a lot of editing on my 1ghz Powerbook G4 with 1.25GB RAM last summer, but I was working with PAL DV and not HDV. You might want to invest in a firewire cardbus card so you'll have two separate firewire busses. It can help avoid problems with both camera and HD on the same internal bus, and also makes copies between two external drives much faster (you will want a second drive for backup... right?).