Hey all,
I'm interested in buying a digital camcorder mainly for recording my daughters school shows and basically just using it for vacation. I've seen some attractive prices on the MiniDV's but I have a few questions about it.
First, would MiniDV be a smart choice to go with say if I wanted to record my daughter's kindergarten graduation and then show it to her ten years from now? Second, is there a way to transfer my files to my pc and then onto a dvd? Finally, does anyone have any suggestions for a good entry-level camcorder that is MiniDV or DVD? Thank you :)

Try THIS (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=859069) link. There is more to say on the subject and I can't right now. You can search in this forum with the terms you want to know more about (+MiniDV +editing)

Many of us edit our MiniDV material on our PCs. There are many good editing programs. (I have used Sony Vegas 6 moviestudio platinum and Ulead's Video Studio 9. Ulead is a faster editor (much) and Sony is more complete, complex and reliable.)

Good luck.

If your goal is showing it to your daughter 10 years from now, the jury's still out on the best way to archieve your footage. Some people say that miniDV tapes actually have a lot longer shelf life than consumer-burned DVDs (which are based on some sort of organic dye that could break down in as little as a few months, if you believe the alarmists).

I'm still researching the best solution for long-term archieving, but it is not automatically true that DVD is the way to go.

I have my kids videos on all three medias: miniDV tape, DVD and harddrive. For playback I always use DVDs, but I already have two DVDs I made last year that stopped playing in DVD players. No scratches on them at all they simply quit playing. I also had a hard drive failure and lost about 40GB of video on it, but no big deal because I still had the original copies on tapes.
For considerations of the storage media I think you really have two issues to think about, one is the playback and the other is long term archive. For playback I think miniDV tape is NOT the choice becase we all know what happens to our audio cassatte tapes and VHS tapes from repeated playbacks, putting the vidoe on DVD is really the way to go. But for long term archive tapes are the most reliable and cheapest. We can still listen to historical records on tapes from seventy years without any trouble (provided it is not repeated playing).