Best way to capture DV contents on the road?

[tomcam]

Am in New Haven, CT for a month with an XH A1 and an HV20 and in need of a way to transfer the MiniDV tapes to a digital medium, plus some basic advice. My Sony G1 laptop does not, surprisingly for a Sony, have a Firewire port.

I will probably shoot about 80-100 miniDV tapes, maybe more. If I understand correctly, that's about 1 TB of data. I have about 13 GB left on my laptop, plus of course I want a backup.

Here are my options as I see them. Please feel free to suggest something I omitted; I'm a n00b in the extreme.

1. My inclination is to buy some kind of 1 TB drive. I have had good look with the Buffalo Terastation but I am not married to it. Use the HV20 as a deck; it has a USB port & I do of course have a USB cable. One minor problem is getting the 1 TB drive home. I'd have to Fed Ex it, which poses a risk to the drive. So...

2. Should I simply buy another 80 tapes (I have 20 now) and keep all tapes?

3. Another option is to buy a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD burner. If so, I'd like recommendations for both hardware and software on that one.

4. I could also use the XH A1 to do the capture via Firewire, but that seems like a bad idea due to head wear. I can't imagine any advantage to that approach but I'm open. If you think this is the best can you also recommend a good USB->Firewire adapter?

5. Also if anyone happens to know where to get Sony DVM63 tapes for less than the $15 apiece they cost here at Circuit City in New Haven I'd like to know about it; otherwise I'll just have some overnighted to the hotel.

6. I just remembered I could buy a couple of smaller, say, 360 MB drives. That would help mitigate problems in shipping; if one breaks, at least the others presumably survive.

I am using Vegas 7.0 but can have my Mac shipped to me & buy FCPro if there is some compelling reason to do so.

Thanks!

[Polle]

Hey, but apparently the Sony G1 Laptop has a PCMCIA-cardslot, so you could get a firewire card for that!

And even worse: Your laptop HAS a firewire port!

Check the specs for an iLink port.