[Nailgun]

I'm embarking on a transcode project after copying 27 DV tapes recorded in DVCPRO.
Obviously, the compression on these standard def files is several generations out of date, and the 13-gig-per-hour file sizes are preposterous for the 720 by 480 resolution they deliver.
I want to put them into a format that's more efficient after doing some processing such as noise reduction and gamma correction. I'd like to choose the codec and container combination likeliest to be around and supported in, say, 20 years.
Googling around, it looks to me like a large portion of the industry has gotten behind AV1.
So, at this point, I'm feeling like AV1 (MKV) is probably the codec to choose. I did an FFMPEG encode using the "constant" quality setting, and it crunches a 50 MB DVCPRO file down to ~1.5 MB with an HVEC comparison at ~ 3 MB. That's shockingly small to the point where I wonder if I screwed something up.
I guess I'm wondering at this point whether it's still too early to begin this work? We still have no players with AV1 hardware decoders, and I wonder if anything that I encode now could end up being unreadable by whatever hardware eventually appears?
I'm less concerned with obtaining the smallest-possible file size than I am with long-term readability. I intend to keep the untouched originals in case I need to do a re-encode at some point in the future, but I'd like to avoid that eventuality ...
I guess the question is: Do you agree that AV1 has the best shot at longevity? And, if you do think that's the case, what signals do we need to see in the real world to provide some assurance that what we encode won't need to be re-done in a relatively short amount of time? How do we know when a new codec is stable enough to justify a big time investment?