AVCHD vs. DV

Hi Steve,
Best choice will depend on what you need the camera for and how important is to edit a given format quickly and natively.

AVCHD gives 4:2:0 colour sampling as DV PAL if you are in PAL land.
If you are in NTSC land then colour sampling for DV NTSC is 4:1:1
4:2:0 colour sampling delivers same colour resolution as 4:1:1 but with different pixel's patterns.

With AVCHD you don't need to rewind or fast forward and can download material quickly but once converted to ProRes it will take a lot more space and you may want to use a FW800 or better eSATA to edit.
AVCHD is still a very compressed format and some cameras may not deliver the best image sharpness on fast movement, nevertheless if you fancy higher resolution than DV you might decide to go for it.

DV is still an option and I still believe that cameras like the Panasonic DVX100 can be a good second hand investment. Quality doesn't only depend on the format but lighting and lenses and skills of course, learning how to use the DVX is good basic training to pro cameras, should you get into that in the future.
It will be still a little while before DV becomes obsolete but certainly the market is overloaded with all these new funky, tiny, cute HDD consumer cameras.

My suggestion is to hire an AVCHD and a DV camera that you have in mind and do some tests (edit,compress,send to DVDstudio) then buy, because people have different opinions and needs and only you know what you need.

Hope that helps,
G.

Keep in mind that with AVCHD — or any other solid-state recording format — you'll need to invest extra time an energy in archiving your raw footage. The trade-off is that you don't have to waste time (or as much time) capturing footage to edit, but with DV you have the choice of simply flipping the record-protect tab and storing the tape somewhere. With AVCHD, you'll need to settle on a way of storing your footage long-term, either by burning it to disc or investing in a tape system of some kind.

I would not recommend using Firewire drives for long-term archiving. They're really cheap and easy as heck to use, but when one fails — and it will — you lose a lot of footage all at once.

Depending on how you work and your ongoing budget, maybe it makes sense to use the original solid-state cards as your archival format, recording to them once and then vaulting them as if they were tape. But that's definitely a lot more expensive than recording to tape, and I have no information at all about long-term reliability of stored solid state cards. It's possible Google could help there; I haven't bothered looking personally, since I'm still shooting on tape.

I would recommend reading this explaination on why AVCHD isn't a reliable native codec for editing.

1. AVCHD is not an editing format, so it needs to be transcoded. It, just like HDV, is highly compressed and as thus needs to be transcoded into an editing format like ProRes or DVCPro HD.

2. The audio will probably not be effected as 48Khz is 48Khz. Now if AVCHD records to some other bitrate, then it will probably converted as well, but that's not likely.

-Brian