video miniDV to a reasonable files

[Aivaras]

Hello,
I have a Sony Camcorder from the old days and bunch of miniDV tapes.  What is the best way to convert them to a reasonable files?

capturing a DV file with linux program called "kino" produces ~12GB file from one cassette.  I would be OK keeping them that big if I would have just a few cassettes, but I have over 50. So that's over 600GB of 720x576 at 25 frames does not seam reasonable thing to do.
So what codec I should use with the least quality lost and keeping my hard drives happy?

Thank you. 

PS. You can admire my ghetto capturing station.

iMac G5 with 1.8GHz single core, 1.5GB DDR ram capturing from one camera.
Q6600 @ 3.0GHz , 8GB DDRII, capturing from another camera. 
Mac connected to Q6600 via gigabit cable to send DV files.
Idea is to keep all DVs in Q6600 computer and send only converted files to NAS.  

That's what you get for buying only new laptops with no firewire, you have to use old computers.

[ALwin]

What's the codec, bit rate that Kino is converting to?

[Aivaras]

none, raw dv stream files. 

[ALwin]

Hmm I would play with two codecs.  Encode to ProRes if you can or use H.264.  With ProRes, perhaps the LT version is enough, with H.264 look for a nice balance between bit rate and resulting file size.

 

Disclaimer: I can't guarantee that those codecs will produce smaller files than your raw DV stream files.

[ALwin]

There are some online discussions that say keeping them as the raw DV stream files you are currently getting are the better choice than converting to another format.

[.spider.]

See if Handbrake nightly can read them. 

Use the high quality deinterlacing setting, the preset and crf is up to you. 

 

The slower the preset the better the file size/quality ratio. The lower the rf the better the image quality.  

 

You could als try lossless encoding with rf = 0 and level = auto