I've a few questions regarding DV RAW..
First of all, once you've captured your giant dv raw data at about ~13 gb/hour, what would you recommend doing with it? Is keeping it in the dv raw format the best* idea? kdenlive makes it easy to convert dv raw to dvd format, does this lose quality? Are there any formats that will retain full quality, and any that will also have a smaller filesize?

It is best to leave it as DV RAW and keep an archive on tape or optical disc when you need to remove it from hard disk to save space. Any conversion to something of a smaller size will yield a loss in quality.

Ahh, thanks for clearing things up. So, is there a way to transfer to dvd without losing quality? .vob format is smaller.. so I guess its impossible to retain quality without just saving .dv to disc.

No, .vob is format mpeg-2 of DVD specification. Video in DV format is lightly comprimed usually 1:10 (1hour has about 13GB). If you want to use one from looseless codecs {huffyuv,lagarith,MPG4-AVC... and other) there is only 1:2...1:4 compress ratio. So if you have dv video, frstly you need to render (cca 130GB/hour) after that you can use looseless codec (cca 1:2). Finaly you will get about 60GB big file in another format without loosing quality.

The best format to archive DV video is DV again.

thanks for the answers