Everything I've read says that mini-dv is better quality than mini dvd or hard drive. The other two formats are more convenient. If you don't want to have to process at all, mini dvd is the best. Hard drive writes to an editable digital file. With mi...
Here's an article discussing the different recording media
You should use your MiniDV camcorder with the default settings before you go messing around with anything. Usually the engineers who designed it know best. As for editing, edit your video in the native format for your camcorder. As for avi, mpeg, etc...