Too many posters much more technically smart than I.

All I know is regardless of camcorder capture compression miniDV is a format standard so I think that means your DV output will be recorded to you hard drive as .avi file format. One hour will require around 12 to 13Gig of HDD space.

The camcorder probably came bundled with a software disc with programs that should control video transfer to PC and probably simple editing and dvd creation.

If not and as already suggested do trial version downloads of good software from Adobe, Pinnacle and ULead.