Simple High Quality DV Captures

[tmozer]

I just installed a FireWire card in my work PC. It is a PIII 800 running XP Pro. XP pro sees my Canon DV Camcorder and Windows Movie Maker allows me to capture to AVI.

I want to be able to dump the contents of my DV tape to a USB 2.0 80 gig external hard drive, bring the files home and then play with them to eventually burn them to DVD's. I essentially would like to create files from my tapes comparable to create WAV files from my CD's. In other words I want to back them up with little or no loss.

Is AVI the way to go? Is there better/simpler/still free software to use for simple DV captures than Win Movie Maker???

[yg1968]

All DV capture programs are more or less the same since the program merely imports the DV stream and wraps it into AVI. The DV is captured by the camcorder not by the firewire card. In any event, DV is roughly 13 gig an hour, so you don't usually archive it on your computer. You can edit DV on your computer. Once you are done, you can either export it back to a DV tape or convert it to mpeg for DVD, SVCD, etc.