I have not seen a cost on this product but it would be interesting to see if there is a possibility that it interprets the long GOP HDV format tc the same way every time. This might eliminate the need for dubbing to another format, etc. for offline/online workflows in HDV.
It is best to use a 4:4:4 codec for this kind of lossless transcoding. Annimation is a 4:4:4 codec, but the file sizes are large and you wil have to bring everythign to a 4:2:2 codec to output the final file. You can always do everything in Annimation and then place that into a 10-bit uncompressed sequence to transcode the DVD.
I mised the Varicam component in this post. I thought we were talking HDcam. FCP and the Varicam are a very good solution for the post workflow described inteh original post. I have some HDCAM 59.94 that needs to be slomoed and downconverted to 23.98 and I think I was hoping I had found a solution.
Please expand on the Kona 2 portion of your post. Are you saying that the Kona 2 is a smooth 60i to 24P downconverter and that you can do this on capture? Also, why only DVCPRO HD why not 10-bit uncompressed as well?
Maybe an individual drive in your raid has failed. If it was a raid zero it would not mount. Have you tried to initialize the drive and reformat it. Does it show up in disk utility? Can you mount it from there?