What is best for video editing?

[mschulz]

I use a digital camcorder with video-in connector attached via IEEE1394 to my PC. It provides much much much better image quality than any bt8x8 based PC card. I postprocess (master&cut) the grabbed video using cinelerra on linux.

The only disadvantage: the grabbed material is huge -  13GB/hour.

[mschulz]

Either the mac or the PC can capture full D1 uncompressed or even High Definition video, surely you realize thats better quality then the 5:1 compression you are getting on the DV tape

Depending on hardware you're using. With help of decent PC card (bt8x8 chips produce awfull interlaced output with occasionaly broken chroma information) it will be surely better to grab uncompressed raw data :-)

plus the audio issues inherent with the format.

What audio issues are you talking about? For my own use a 48kHz uncompressed 16-bit PCM provided by my camcorder is sufficient

PS. I do not copy the material onto DV tapes. Instead, I let my camcorder to digitalise the analog input and output it directly through ieee1394.

[mschulz]

Two channels at 16 bit or 4 channels at 12 bit is what the spec provides.

Yes, and that's enough for me. It would be also, most likely, enough for the one who has started the thread

In addition, instead of a camera (unless he wants a camera), a firewire bridge is at least as good a solution, and most likely cheaper and is really built for what he (and you) are doing with DV video.

True, but I do have the camera already