Ingesting HDV from a Sony deck for archiving

Question

I bought a Sony HVR-M15AU for the purpose of ingesting all my HDV tapes onto hard drives for later editing. I have never used FCP but intend to train on it soon. At this point all I want to do is get everything on hard drives. The deck is connected via FireWire 400. Not sure what to do next. I want to preserve the original quality of what's on tape. Ideally every scene could be a different file.

Answer 1

I understand compression, sorry if the zip analogy confused you. Zip is lossless, that's the only real difference. Other than that, they're simply different compression algorithms. I brought it up in the context of wondering if the MOV format is simply a wrapper, and you confirmed that it is.
When playing an HDV tape in a camcorder, the output via the HDMI port is uncompressed. This gives you an identical picture with a higher data rate and bit footprint for the purposes of display compatibility. I was trying to verify whether FCP also decompresses the HDV datastream before storing it. You indicate FCP does this "natively" which I assume means it uses the HDV stream without decompressing and recompressing it.
So when I capture HDV and I wind up with an MOV file that is roughly 200MB in size for every minute of video, you're saying this is exactly how it was stored on tape and has not been uncompressed. A 60-minute HDV tape therefore has an estimated capacity of around 12GB. A 2TB drive would therefore hold about 166 of those HDV tapes.
The HDV MOV files can then be stored as clips to be used in future FCP projects, and can be imported into FCP natively and edited natively without further decompression/compression and final output can result in HDV MOV files which are identical in quality to their originals, assuming no titles or effects have been added. True?