To add my 2 cents to the discussion... I too had a Sony Digital8 camera, and can agree that DV's only use was to losslessly import the video off the camera into the project. Any use of it after that point ended up messing up transitions, text overlays, and all sorts of other stuff. MP4 didn't exist yet back when I was doing this, so I had to encode to MPEG-2 to ensure some sort of decent quality in the final project.
An hour of DV video only took up 13GB of storage... but my main computer back then had precisely 13GB of storage for my video AND my OS.