Used a Canon Optura mini DV cam.. that may be the problem then eh? what deck should I use?

Go with Sony DSR-11, that'll handle it just fine. Any deck that's DVCAM will do, DHR-1000, DSR-30, DSR-40, DSR-45 etc.
If the original transfer was to Digital Betacam or Beta SP you can capture the tape directly into Vegas as DV using the Sony J30 decks.
No real advantage over having someone else transfer to MiniDV and then ingesting that.
Of course if it's film originated and you want to keep as much data as possible you'd do better capturing 4.2.2 from from the original tapes or getting the files somehow directly onto a hard drive. From my limited experience just how much you gain depends on if you're working in PAL or NTSC and what your final output will be.
Bob.

Yeah, my DV cam is not reading it correctly.. there is a 10 second difference after 30 seconds of capture. Direct to hard drive was the original plan but cost an extra $1200 at the studio, no luck finding a digibeta deck for rent in Portland. I have access to a DVX100, will that work?

DVCAM is a Sony format, so it is unlikely that a Panasonic camera will support it correctly. Although, I don't actually know for sure. As farss pointed out above, there are a lot of DVCAM decks. Probably the easiest to find for rent would be the DSR-11 or the Sony PD-150 and PD-170 cameras fully support DVCAM recording and playback. It should be easy enough to find one of these three units in Portland.

John

Farss, I have the Convergent Design box, how can I get beta footage at 4:2:2 captured? I use the vid cap from sony currently, do I have to get the BMD card to accomplish this?

Yes,
and you'll need around 90Gbytes / hour of disk space and SATA drives in RAID 0. As you've got the SD Connect you only need the basic Decklink card.
At some point in time Convergent should have a driver that'll let you capture 4.2.2 over 1394 however you'll need the same amount of storage and fast drives.
Bob.