Running DV footage right to hard drive?
 

Does it make more sense to have the footage go right to the capture software? I have recently purchased a 200gig hard drive with an external casing with USB2.0 - I can run the footage right to the hard drive - I am guessing that there is some loss of quality from TAPE to firewire to harddrive. Is this true? Would it be noticeable?

There is no loss of quality in transferring from Tape to Hard drive.

However, many people choose to capture direct to Hard Drive to save time in the capture process, and because they can capture longer to a hard drive than to a tape.

The trade-off being, you have no archival record if the drive goes down, and the bulkiness of the camera-drive connection. (See Firestore for HDD storage possiblilities)

Some people wear belts and suspenders, and keep a tape running while simultaneously capturing to HDD.

Actually, the quality of recording should be better with direct to disc, than with record to tape, due to the elimination of contamination related dropouts. Which happens with tape. There is no dust in a HDD. D2D should offer a better quality increase than the increased quality achieved with the DV CAM super short play process, in my opinion.

The quality issue may be more of a technicality -- drop-out in a digital picture is so easily compensated you never see it. And if you do, it has more to do with dirty heads than anything else. Easily fixed.
Here's what you lose going direct to disk.

1. Convenient back up of everything you shot. Your tape is already the back up.

2. If you shoot tape and hard drive simultaneously, the harddrive may not share the same timecode as the tape -- you should check.
One of the biggest issues with editing is backing up projects and maintaining references to original media. If all your references end at a hard drive, you'll have to maintain a lot of storage until your project is completed and you're sure you won't need to revisit it anytime again. With tape, you can delete all your media files, and recapture them from tape later.

3. Quality is generally associated with color-space and picture size. No matter what you do, you're still in DV-25. Not to mention the inconvenience of dragging the drive around.

Pluses would be 1) continuous recording, 2) immediate availability of media for editing.

Not to rain on the hard-drive thing, but it's not without its own issues.

wish it will be true ... you will get messy image, lost data will create unrepairable blocks in image...