Editing Sony Digital8 DV transfers?
 

So I've been transferring Digital8 video from a Sony handycam over firewire into a native DV .avi file which to my understanding is more like a file transfer than a capture as it's already in a digital format. Problem comes in where I have one tape that's been struggling to read properly in some places which requires multiple run troughs to get all parts of the video without studding and errors. I'm trying to figure out what methods are available to edit those different transfers together to make one cohesive file? The goal is for it to stay as a DV format and maintain all of the timestamp data that is still present in the data. I don't want that data to get ripped out while editing. I've seen some comments saying DV is intraframe format which makes it ideal for editing, but I've not found an answer on what program to use to make such edits. Virtualdub and Avidemux sound like they have that support possibly but I have been unable to figure out how to make cuts to replace the bad parts with correct versions. Sorry if this is a bit ramble-y and thanks in advance!

I think what you might want to look into is a free program called DV rescue. I haven't really done a capture with a ton of errors in it, but it'll try to automate doing multiple passes over bad areas to get the errors down to a minimum. DV decks also used type of metal oxide that can supposedly chemically fuse to the heads, so a regular paper/alcohol clean may not be nearly as effective as using a real cleaning tape which is slightly abrasive.

As far as how to actually take multiple full captures and turn them into one "best" pass, there's something called median filtering that might possibly be helpful. I've never done it, but my understanding is that it is relatively commonly used in the laserdisc community to get rid of dropouts for some discs that have disc rot as the rot occurs randomly in different places on the disc - so having multiple captures of different discs of same pressing results in theoretically no dropouts after enough discs are factored in. In your case, there's just the one tape, but multiple passes may have errors on some playbacks and not others. There's also physically cleaning or baking the tape that could potentially help, though DV tape is kind of thin and more prone to damage if physically cleaning the tape.

Back in the day (2000s-early 2010s?) many video editing programs offered "smart rendering" of DV video, in which only modified frames of the video would be re-encoded, and the rest would be passed through losslessly. Serif MoviePlus was one of these video editors with smart rendering of DV.

DVRescue does indeed merge the different captures perfectly, and it knows exactly which frames are the good ones with no instruction. Just make sure the captures were done from the same device, since sometimes I've had issues merging different captures from different decks or cameras.

Probably because one device was set to 12-bit/32 kHz audio mode and another was set to 16-bit/48 kHz audio mode.

Exactly my issue! The Sony deck I use is outputting the original spec, while I suspect the Sony cameras I use resample it before the output. It's caused many headaches, especially since some earlier captures with more data won't merger with later ones done with more info but additional corruption in some segments.
Hybrid also seems to butcher the audio by speeding it up to 48 and not only having the pitch be too high, but also immediately losing sync. Such a headache! I wish the footage had been shot 16-bit 48khz in the first place so I wouldn't have to deal with all this 20-30 years later...

Perhaps I'm doing something wrong but DVRescue doesn't seem to want to function properly for me. I can't have it manually do the recording it's self as it's not supported on Windows apparently and inputting the files captured from WinDV, while it does seem to correctly identify the areas in the files where there are errors attempting to merge creates a .DV file that VLC says is missing an index. Telling it to ignore allows it to play but it bugs out real bad when reaching the areas that were "fixed".