Thanks for the quick response!
I'm not sure exactly what the footage is going into, I've asked a few times and was told just to send a DVD. My thought was that if I rendered it out to exactly the same format, it'd be lossless when it went on air. The person who asked for the DVcam tape is hopefully going to be able to tell me exactly what format they use.
My footage footage will all be 15 minutes long.
Thanks for the suggestion about AVi or Quicktime, I was sort of wondering about that. If I sent them a large uncompressed AVI (it would be a big file, as the footage is mixed DVCPro and HDV), I wonder if they could just ingest that. I might be wrong, but I think it would produce higher quality if they re-compress HD to their format than standard mpeg.

You could just render the footage to DV in Vegas and burn the AVI file to a data DVD. A 4.7G DVD will hold 20 minutes of DV.
Many broacasters use DVCAM rather than DV as it's more reliable, the tape (despite some clever Sony packaging) is exactly the same. What's further confusing is some of the older Sony DVCAM VCRs can read DV or DVCAM but only write DVCAM, creating the impression that they can't be used to play DV. You don't need an expensive VCR to write DVCAM, the DSR-11 is about the cheapest VCR that'll write DVCAM.

Bob.

If you've been capturing HDV, you may find that that machine will record DVCam - the Sony HDVs do, or at least the Z1 does.

Thanks Peter,
I'll look into that. We capture HDV with a sony A1u, and it only takes the smaller tapes, but can DVcam be recorded to those tapes?
I understand from the previous answers that probably not, but if the cable company can ingest miniDV (even if it can't record to it) it shouldn't be a problem. Right???
Thanks

Wait, sorry for the newbie confusion, I just re-read Bob's post (for the third time!).
So if I just render out to the HVR-A1 in DV and send them that tape, it would all be the same to the cable company?

Just to be clear.
DV and DVCAM uses the exact same codec, writing or reading to/from tape is the exact same data. So in Vegas if you want to capture a DVCAM tape, it's the same as DV.
In Vegas if you want to print to DVCAM again it's all the same. You just have to switch the VCR /Camera into DVCAM mode. When capturing DVCAM the VCR will automatically sense the way the tape has been written.

To answer your specific question, it should be.
If they put your DV tape into any of their VCRs it'll play. Problem might be if the Standards Nazis guarding the front door intervene or not. To be 100% certain that you don't get caught by them you could just get a dub house to dub your DV tape to DVCAM if you can't rent a DSR-11 or even a Z1 locally. If you were nearby and turned up on my door with a blank tape to dub it to, I'd do it for nix.

Just some further explaination.
DVCAM writes faster in effect and always has locked audio. The former means less risk of dropouts. The latter matters little these days, used to be an issue with some NLEs.

Oftenly when people speak about DVCAM, what the mean is the larger sized tapes however DVCAM and DV can be used with the MiniDV or 'DVCAM' sized tapes. All that changes is the size of the cassette and the amount of tape in the cassette.

Bob.

Hi Bob,
Thanks for the post, that really does clear things up for me. I'll just try and render back to my A1 at DV and see what they say.
I wish we had a dub house around here, but unfortunately I think I am actually the local dub house! Using an old Hi-8 camera, a VCR, the HDV camera and our trusty Vegas computer, we've been trying to digitally archive some older hurricane footage. But I guess that's not really here nor there.
Thanks for the input, its a huge help

Matt