I have firewire for the pc and for the deck as well. On the deck, there are composite and dvi ports, but I don’t have the same on the pc. So I think, firewire is the solution. But the “DV” label above the firewire on the deck made me worry.
I prefer not to use uncompressed avi, because of filesize, and because we store the footage on network drive, which can handle the bandwidth of DVCPro50, but for an uncompressed or lossless codec it would surely become slow during editing.
Currently, what I did, is I created DVCPro project in premiere cs3, and captured the footage as dvcpro, progressive, pal. It seems like it not possess the rude artifacts of dv.