I'll just keep talking to myself . . . ;)

After some googling I found that HDV can be captured through firewire, but some say that HDVsplit is a good program to use to capture with . . . or is capturing HDV in Vegas just as good or not a good choice? What would HDVsplit do for me?

The A1 is best captured through firewire, preferably a firewire card directly off your machine as opposed to something like AVS which is dv passed through usb.

Some have had problems with Vegas capture utility and I am one of them. I use HDVsplit as a result and IMO... it's a better capture utility than the one in vegas. You can scene split on the fly with both utilities but with HDVsplit you can also scene split on an already captured file.

HDVsplit will also allow you to label each scene with the time/date shot... Vegas will not

An .M2V file is generally a video-only "elementary" MPEG2 stream. There should be a corresponding .MPA file that contains the audio stream. If, for some reason, Pinnacle is putting both the video and audio stream into one file, then it's really a "program stream" and if you rename the file with an .MPG extension, it will probably load into Vegas just fine. This wouldn't be the first stupid thing that Pinnacle has done...

HDV can (and should) be captured via Firewire, I've never had any particular problems using the Vegas capture utility, except for one thing: If you choose to do scene detection, where it splits each clip into a separate file, the Vegas capture utility doesn't split the files correctly, it's usually a few frames off. HDVSplit does it correctly. However, if you just want to capture a full tape, Vegas VidCap works fine. HDV captured via either Vegas or HDVSplit will create "M2T" files, which will have both the audio and video in a "Transport Stream" container, which, although similar, is technically different than a "program stream" or having the audio and video in separate files, which are called "elementary streams."

"An .M2V file is generally a video-only "elementary" MPEG2 stream. There should be a corresponding .MPA file that contains the audio stream. If, for some reason, Pinnacle is putting both the video and audio stream into one file, then it's really a "program stream" and if you rename the file with an .MPG extension,"

Both Pinnacle Studio and Avid liquid capture as m2v/wav

There are some definite advantages to this... although it may not initially seem so.

Thanks guys. Vegas doesn't respond when I rename the file to mp2, mpg. It can see the file, it just isn't able to use it. Anyway, I think I'll be better off capturing through a seperate firewire card. Off to the computer shop tomorrow.

One more question, and I know this might be a bit involved so you can give me the short version . . . if I shoot and capture in HDV and then export to DV 4:3 with say black cutoff areas top/bottom, would the quality of the footage be better than shooting in DV and then exporting to DV? I assume it wouldn't make much difference because the final number of lines would be the same, but would the picture quality be better?

"if I shoot and capture in HDV and then export to DV 4:3 with say black cutoff areas top/bottom, would the quality of the footage be better than shooting in DV and then exporting to DV?"

Yes.
HDV has a resolution of 1440x1080 while DV's resolution is only 720x480 (for ntsc). There will always be losses when editing/rendering so you want to start off with the best quality you can shoot.

If your end result however is to disk, then I would skip the DV part all together, shoot, captue and edit as HDV then export as mpeg2 dvd. DVD is mpeg2 so it makes little sense to export as dv.