Annie,

I use a JVC DV Camera hooked to my Dish Digital Satellite system.
I then capture to my PC via Firewire, and Edit w/ Sony Vegas 5.0. I tweak the audio a lot since TV audio pretty much sucks. The only thing I do to the video is crop the top 4 lines so the carrier band (which shows up as wavy lines) is removed.
I render to Mpeg-2 in dvd quality with a slightly lower bit rate to save a smidge more space.

Hope this helps,

Joe