To answer most of the questions, all firewire cards would work the same. The big difference will be in the bundled software to deal with the pictures. FWIW, I believe they're MPG encoded on the camera, so you'll have to convert them to get them into AVI format, and I'm not sure why you'd want to make them a lot bigger! Digital Video Links is an assortment of sites that will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about digital video cameras and extracting the video. 
