>Is there a lossless format that's smaller than the original DV? The 1.5TB I have is still annoying to handle.
Been a long time since I dealt with it, I converted all my remaining DV at long last start of the decade, so I might be fuzzy here. But IIRC the DV video codec itself was some 90s-era lossy, and the audio was flat out uncompressed. Before doing anything else I'd try doing something at the filesystem level, like putting it on a ZFS fs with big (at least 1 MB) records and a somewhat more aggressive compression like zstd-3 and see what happens. Even though video and audio is normally a very bad match for general reversible compression, for really old partly raw stuff you might get some level of savings for free which maybe would be good enough. Worth poking anyway since it'd be so lazy, I'd try it myself if I hadn't converted it all already.
For actual reencode, if you want real lossless try taking a look at x265's lossless (and near-lossless) modes [0]. Gonna be bigger than even ultra high quality lossy but should still offer improvement over DV. For the audio probably just use FLAC. You can put both into an mkv. If you can be satisfied with visually lossless then of course you can do much better, but that depends on whether you might want to use it as a source for more editing down the road.
Finally, not sure what you mean by "annoying to handle" but 1.5TB isn't actually that much anymore. Are you sure you can't just throw hardware at it? Even a basic 2TB NVMe SSD right now is <$180 (and that's including a premium from the supply chain shortage, I bought cheaper drives last spring). Entry NVMe drives might be 30-50% the speed of higher end ones, but that still equates to gigabytes per second of sequential r/w which is what you'll be leaning on for video. Compared to the value of your time and futzing with it, just putting it on a stick or two might be worth it, particularly if you then back it up to Backblaze or Glacier or the like.
Been a long time since I dealt with it, I converted all my remaining DV at long last start of the decade, so I might be fuzzy here. But IIRC the DV video codec itself was some 90s-era lossy, and the audio was flat out uncompressed. Before doing anything else I'd try doing something at the filesystem level, like putting it on a ZFS fs with big (at least 1 MB) records and a somewhat more aggressive compression like zstd-3 and see what happens. Even though video and audio is normally a very bad match for general reversible compression, for really old partly raw stuff you might get some level of savings for free which maybe would be good enough. Worth poking anyway since it'd be so lazy, I'd try it myself if I hadn't converted it all already.
For actual reencode, if you want real lossless try taking a look at x265's lossless (and near-lossless) modes [0]. Gonna be bigger than even ultra high quality lossy but should still offer improvement over DV. For the audio probably just use FLAC. You can put both into an mkv. If you can be satisfied with visually lossless then of course you can do much better, but that depends on whether you might want to use it as a source for more editing down the road.
Finally, not sure what you mean by "annoying to handle" but 1.5TB isn't actually that much anymore. Are you sure you can't just throw hardware at it? Even a basic 2TB NVMe SSD right now is <$180 (and that's including a premium from the supply chain shortage, I bought cheaper drives last spring). Entry NVMe drives might be 30-50% the speed of higher end ones, but that still equates to gigabytes per second of sequential r/w which is what you'll be leaning on for video. Compared to the value of your time and futzing with it, just putting it on a stick or two might be worth it, particularly if you then back it up to Backblaze or Glacier or the like.