I'd suggest avoiding DV - just for the 4:1:1 chroma subsampling issue. It's definitely not a huge deal (especially from VHS sourced analog video which has very very low chroma resolution to begin with), but I'd definitely suggest capturing to a fast lossless codec like HuffYUV - in YUY2 (8 bit 4:2:2) mode. 480i60 should easily be low enough bitrate to capture in real-time even to a laptop drive. UTVideo was also mentioned, which I hear good things about but haven't personally used.
You can easily edit HuffYUV in Premiere, do your edits / effects, and output a HuffYUV master. This could be your final archival format, or you could bring it into AviSynth, and do some fancy-pants deinterlacing and cleanup (QTGMC etc) to get sexy 60p video for progressive display, again with HuffYUV as the storage codec. You could also get clever and go to lossless or near lossless H.264 via x264 at this point.
If it was up to me, I would do the following:
1) Capture lossless 480i 4:2:2, probably with VirtualDub or similar.
2) Edit as necessary in whatever NLE, output again as lossless 480i 4:2:2, with an uncompressed WAV file for audio.
3) Write an AviSynth script to bob-deinterlace / clean with QTGMC, and convert to YV12 (4:2:0)
4) Feed this directly to x264 to encode a near-lossless H.264 stream. Sample command line:
Code:
x264.exe input.avs --preset slower --tune film --crf 14 --vbv-maxrate 14000 --vbv-bufsize 14000 --level 31 --output 480p60_H.264.mp4
4) Encode WAV audio into AAC using eac3to. Sample command line
Code:
eac3to input.wav output.m4a
5) Use YAMB to mux the video-only MP4 with the audio-only M4A file.
You'll end up with an MP4 file that will play in basically any software player, and probably quite a few hardware players too... It should be totally transparent to your source, and not be nearly as big as the HuffYUV master.
DVD is probably your best bet for totally universal compatibility, but if you go this route, use your 480i source, as DVD doesn't support 480p60.
Good luck!!
Derek