I have managed to configure the fire wire digitizer station to capture and the allow for saving, editing and exporting a nicely compatible mp4 file.

This is how I did it:

I used kino with the following command line changes after it was installed:

sudo chmod a+rw /dev/raw1394

That will change the file permissions to allow all users read and write access for firwire. If this isn't done kino wont work unless launched as a super user.

Kino is needed to preview and manipulate the tape being viewed to the point before capture. If the whole file was being captured I would have used dvgrab, which is a command line way of simply sucking the video in dv format onto the hdd.

After it is saved as a .dv I used openshot and imported the .dv file in and added a title and simple fade in fade out. (openshot has no capture capability) I then exported with the following settings:

Profile: All formats
Target: mp4 h.264
Everything else left on default.

This exported a 6 minute video in less than 6 minutes.