Import Fail While Live Recording with Canon HV30

...and you save two fifty for the tape

Actually, as someone who'd come up through era, yes, it can make a huge difference.

cgbier wrote: Live recording gives you the full 1920, instead of 1440, coming from the sensor and you forgo the HDV compression. I have yet to see a discernible difference though.

If you are capturing through the firewire then you have already gone through HDV compression. I have an HDV camera, the XLH1, that was very expensive at the time, partly because it had an HD/SDI out port, and this definitely bypassed the HDV compression (allowing you to record the uncompressed signal directly from the sensor and capture to an external recorder, or to a computer using a Matrox device etc).

The wear and tear on the tape heads is over stated for HDV cameras, because I believe there are heads for recording and there are different heads for playback (and capturing). These cameras were built with playback and capturing in mind as part of the daily process.