Obviously we want our footage to look it's best.

That starts with the DV tape.

- Do certain DV tapes record better than others?

After you've filmed your footage you'll want to capture it to your computer (In my case a PC)

- Does particular editing software capture footage better than others. Avid, Vegas, Premiere, Final Cut?

- Once the footage is captured. Is it better to achieve the faux 24 frames on your own, or through a plug in like Magic Bullet? Similarily is it better to achieve the film Gamma, and color correction with editing software opposed to the Magic bullet plugin?

- After you've edited, color corrected and done all the tricks to give your film he right "look" What is the best format to save it in, maintaining the best possible output?

Sorry if these are newbie questions.

Obviously we want our footage to look it's best.

That starts with the DV tape.

- Do certain DV tapes record better than others?

You'll get lots of conflicting answers on this one. I doubt anyone has done any experimenting to give an objective answer. I'll tell you what I do and why. I use the same brand of tape as my cam. I figure there can be no better tape than the one they brand. That said, a lot of tape brands are made by the same company and branded by whomever so you can't really be sure the Sony tape is different form the Panasonic, for example.

I also use a mid-grade tape. I figure the lowest priced tape is low price for a reason and I don't want to find out why. The highest priced tape is probably more than I need for my amateur videos. As always, YMMV.

After you've filmed your footage you'll want to capture it to your computer (In my case a PC)

- Does particular editing software capture footage better than others. Avid, Vegas, Premiere, Final Cut?

No. Digital video capture takes the exact bit-for-bit video frames on your tape and copies them over to your PC and puts them into a file. That is, unless you do some kind of conversion as you capture, which you shouldn't do. Capture to DV-AVI so you get an exact copy.

- Once the footage is captured. Is it better to achieve the faux 24 frames on your own, or through a plug in like Magic Bullet? Similarily is it better to achieve the film Gamma, and color correction with editing software opposed to the Magic bullet plugin?

You'll get a lot of answers on this, too. I've never tried for the "movie look" (you'll even get a lot of opinions on exactly what that means) but I have heard the Magic Bullet software radically increases your render times in Vegas. Of course, it'll take you time to do whatever you need to do manually to achieve some kind of movie look so it'll cost you either way.

- After you've edited, color corrected and done all the tricks to give your film he right "look" What is the best format to save it in, maintaining the best possible output?

AVI, definitely, if you mean for archiving. For delivery, you'll need to pick the format that's suited for your intended delivery vehicle: MOV or WMV for the web, MPEG-2 for DVD, etc. But for archiving the edited video a good AVI codec will maintain pretty good quality.

Another option is not to render for archiving at all. After you encode to your delivery format, just save the original footage (and any narration and music you add) and your project file (or whatever you NLE calls it). Then you have no loss at all. If you need to encode to another format later just open the project and encode.

Sorry if these are newbie questions.
Maybe, but it never hurts to ask.

Good luck.

Dennis

1. Do certain DV tapes record better than others?

That depends on what you exactly mean. They all record the same (quality)
signal. However, tapes may of course be of different quality and thus your
ability to get the same signal back off the tape may be different (although
with any brand tape you really should not have any problems!)

2. Does particular editing software capture footage better than others. Avid, Vegas, Premiere, Final Cut?

No, not with DV.

3. Once the footage is captured. Is it better to achieve the faux 24 frames on your own, or through a plug in like Magic Bullet? Similarily is it better to achieve the film Gamma, and color correction with editing software opposed to the Magic bullet plugin?

That depends on your editing software, your personal taste (most important
factor in this!!) and if you can work with the particular interface.

4. After you've edited, color corrected and done all the tricks to give your film he right "look" What is the best format to save it in, maintaining the best possible output?

That depends on where you want to go with it. If you want to go out to DVD
then you can only use MPEG-2. That's it. However, if you want to store it for
archival purposes the best would be UNCOMPRESSED (AVI for example. Simply
don't choose a codec [ie, none] or select uncompressed, depends on your
NLE), and the after that DV AVI. If you've just done straight cuts this will
not loose you any quality. Otherwise there will be slight quality drop (in theory),
which you cannot see with the current codecs out there (first generational loss)