I'm going to be assembling a project that will be shot by various people on various HD cameras.

Does anyone have a suggestion for what format I should request this footage in?

At least one of the cameras will be using P2 cards and downloading to a laptop, so I'm guessing they could all send me some kind of data files on a DVD or Blu-ray disc?

thanks for your helps -

I've not been in your situation, but I'm thinking that the source format would be best. P2, HDV, whatever. Untouched would give you the best flexibility in post.

As to the media, it depends upon what you have. DLT tape would be the cheapest for media but if you don't have a drive the price goes way up. Great for archiving too. Barring that, a USB hard drive might be the next most cost-effective. It might also speed the transfer into your editing machine. Keep in mind that hard drives are not optimal for archiving. You can search here for a lot more information on that. Third of my choices would be BD. Very transportable. Good (potentially) for archiving but the real-world longevity of BD-Rs is yet to be proven. However, BD-R disks are still a bit dear.

But this is just my opinion, as an outsider looking in.

My real world experience: you can request whatever you like. They will deliver whatever they want or can. Probably the easiest is to get everything in native format, transferred/captured to a hard drive. External hard drives are cheper than tape nowadays!

Important thing is, what you do from there, and I would transcode everything into a single format to keep things straight - in my case Canopus HQ or uncompressed depending on how much post work you do and what your delivery format is.

I just found out that most of the footage is going to be converted to DVCPro-HD and shipped to us on a hard drive, so that will make it easy.

thanks for your responses.