Went through a very similar journey recently as well. In my case using a Macbook was a non-starter, as certain adapters are prohibitively expensive these days, if you can even get your hands on one. Thankfully my son has a desktop Windows PC and Firewire PCI cards are cheap and plentiful, so getting connected that way worked out. Much better than an earlier attempt via RCA cables (simple but digital -> analog -> digital is not the way to go).

My pipeline was camera -> WinDV -> DVdate (to extract exact datetimes into srt subtitles) -> Handbrake (to convert to mp4).