Yes

I'm admittedly a novice at this. But it is a lot cheaper to buy more hard drive space than even a cheapo DV camcorder--you can get 400GB or more for the cost of a bottom of the line camcorder. Why not just capture entire tapes at once onto your hard drive? You can delete unwanted scenes and perform NLEs afterwards. Is there something wrong with that strategy?

No, it's what most of us with modern NLEs do today. The video stream is separated into clips according to choices we make in the setup.

i use vegas video to capture my tapes. i hook up my pd-150 via firewire and capture each tape in one go. vegas scene detection detects shot breaks and captures them as seperate .avi files ready for editing. after capturing the whole tape, you can later delete out-takes.

i like this method also because i know that every time i capture a tape this way, each clip will automatically be named the same name. so if you run into disaster and my hard drive dies on me, taking with it all my captured media. all i have to do is open one of my backup files of the project and re-capture the tapes. the clips will receive the same name as the earlier batch had and my editing software will just replace the lost clips with the new ones.


just remember:
for scene detection to work (at least the way it works in vegas), you MUST set date and time in your camcorder. scene detection detects breaks in date/time continuity.