And, presuming your original footage is standard definition video, a DVD should look virtually identical to the original footage.

(There's, of course, no such thing as a high-definition DVD -- unless you put BluRay files on it, in which case it's technically not a DVD anymore.)

Many will scoff, but when pristine quality is not the primary consideration and disk space is, i've gotten pretty good results with DivX at about 6Mbps. The files will be about 1/4 the size of the original DV and Vegas seems quite happy with it. Also, since they will be .avi files it's very easy to swap the original DV file back in for those cases when you need the better version.

On the other hand, 70 hours of DV should just fit on a 1TB drive, which can usually be picked up in the $55 range.

That's what I was wondering about, given that the avi files are about six times the size of the mpeg2 files.

I'm putting the original footage to a 1TB drive (cost me £80 though), but also want to keep the rendered footage in a format which would allow later quick editing by the originator, who does not have the time right now.

(I realise this sounds crazy, but its often quite difficult deciding what other people want to keep.)

Anyway, thanks for the tip. I'll try DivX and see what it looks like wehn converted to mpeg2.

Divx is a great delivery format, but it's not a good format to save your file in if you expect to re-edit it. (That's the price of all that file compression.)

So, if you decide to output a Divx file, be sure to keep the original DV-AVI around for editing.

DV-AVI ->Divx ->MPEG-2 is not a route I would undertake.
DV->DVD is bad enough.

Another option to capturing all 70 hours of video is to index the tapes with Scenalyzer LIVE, http://www.scenalyzer.com/main.html. From it you can "batchcapture" the wanted video. I own a copy of it and it's a good investment.

If not, I recommend investing in a 1TB drive and capturing the video to DV-AVI files. The time it would take to capture a tape then convert it, to me, is not worth it.

But we should ask, how will you be capturing the video? Cam > Firewire > VidCap?

There are hardware devices you can buy that will capture the video and encode it to mpeg2 on the fly.... http://www.grassvalley.com/products/converters

I'm capturing Cam > Firewire > Sony Video Capture.

Then editing and making a DVD. I'm keeping the original AVI files, but wanted to save the owner having to do a re-edit if what I've done is not what she wants.

Thanks for that. I'll just keep the original AVIs.

Could they make Blu Rays later? At better quality than DVD?