First, the transfer is long: as far as I understand, it takes the whole footage duration. During this time, the videocamera can't be used.
That's just life.
That's just life.
Exactly. There's a reason video editing is a difficult and laborious process, and that reason is the sheer length of time it takes to do things. If you think capturing the movie is tedious, wait til you render effects on the edited video. And of course that's nothing compared to the rendering time if you do, say, 3D animation.
Think of it this way; this is still a big improvement over editing by shuttling around 2 VCRs.
Also, this is most definitely not the bottleneck. The time you spend capturing footage is a tiny sliver of the total time you spend preparing a video. Editing soaks up enormous amounts of time.
wouldn't be better a miniDVD support instead of a MiniDV ?
A miniDVD won't store enough data. DV results in enormous file sizes, so big that you routinely need to buy a new harddrive every time you start working on a decently-long video. Only tape can store that much data in a small and cost effective form.
Which reminds me: don't even think of buying any camera other than a tape one. I've had to tell too many disappointed students that the salesman lied to them and the brand new DVD camcorder they bought is essentially useless for editing.
how do you transfer your video from MiniDV to PC, how easy is it, and how long does it take ?
Admittedly I didn't spend all that long trying, and this was years ago so I'm sure the situation is better now, but I have never gotten reliable transfer to a PC. For this task I gave up twiddling with Windows, and now I only do video work on Macintosh.