When capturing HDV from my camcorder, what are the defining factors to give me ultimate picture quality?

Question

Is it my Firewire card or cable, or is it the software? Should I be capturing at 32 bits? I need the best possible picture quality. It's HDV tape if that helps.

Answer 1

If you are capturing HDV over firewire and your editing application recognizes that as HDV, then that is as good as it gets. I am not aware of any editor that requires you to specify the BPS when importing - they typically only specify the video format (DV, Widescreen DV, HDV, etc.)

Answer 2

Little Dog's right - all you're doing is transferring a strings of 0s and 1s from one place to another.  It either works or it doesn't.