Any way to reduce size of captured DV?

Using iMovie '09, I am going back to all my old DV tapes and recapturing them before the tapes start to degrade. The problem is that an hour of DV capture takes 13Gb on my hard drive - 45 hours of tapes will not fit. When I copy from my new HD camera (which uses and internal hard drive, not tapes), iMovie gives me an option to capture in full fidelity, or in a lower fidelity that takes only 1/3 the space but is almost as good (and definitely good enough for DVDs). This is especially frustrating because the first 16 hours are actually old VHS that I copied to DV a long time ago, so full DV resolution is really overkill for them.
Is there anything to reduce the size of captures from a DV camera?

The issue is that I already have 4TB of total disk space: 1 in the Mac, 1 in an external Firewire disk (the one on which I have all my videos), and 2 in a USB external drive that is my Time Machine backup. The Firewire drive already is down to 450GB free, and if I keep going, it will fill before I capture, edit, and burn DVDs for all my videos. I could then start using my Mac's internal drive, but that would only be a delaying action, plus I lose the portability of being able to take my video data to another computer (say, the Apple store for another 1-1 session).
The main issue is that I must have every bit of data on two separate pieces of hardware to prevent data loss in case of a disk crash, etc. Pretty soon after I fill the Firewire disk, the Time Machine disk will get full of backups, and there is no option for getting more than 2TB on a disk unless I spend a bunch of money on a RAID array. I'm out of USB ports on the iMac, and a 2TB Firewire drive is almost double the cost of USB.
I guess I just thought that, since iMovie '09 reduces the size of my HD captures with no apparent loss in quality, it could do the same for my regular DV captures. I'll look at this MPEG Streamclip tool and see what it can do for me.

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