Archiving analog video digitally for later editing

Hi:
I'm a newbie to iMovie and have been through the discussion threads without finding an answer. Thanks in advance for any help.
I have about 16 hours of analog tape from a Hi 8 Sony camcorder. I just picked up a Canon ZR200 which allows me to use the analog to digital passthrough feature to move the old analog tape to the computer. I've been able to import some video and have some rather huge files. I see in the forums that an hour of DV video is about 13 GB which is consistent with what I have on my computer.
I have two objectives here. First, I want to archive the clips from the analog tapes to DVD in a raw and unedited format. Essentially, I want to have a DVD copy of the tapes I have presently. However, I also want to later be able to go back and edit the video backed up on DVD into more concise clips using iMovie and put together several separate DVDs of the edited material.
I don't want to just backup the raw DV files to DVD as data files because they're so huge. I have about 20 G free on my computer, so I can't archive there and I'm trying to avoid buying an external HD.
Is there some way to archive the unedited video on DVD (as data or movie) so that I can later reedit?

In reading your response and other threads, I am
assuming that when I Share to a Full Quality movie, I
am making a quicktime movie as the output which will
be much smaller than the DV file; is this correct?
The Shared movie is smaller because it is shorter. But in terms of quality, the Full Quality export is exactly the same content as the DV video used in the iMovie HD project.
In iMovie HD, a "Full Quality" export creates a movie that matches the natural video of the currently active iMovie project. The video format varies by project type. A DV project exports to a different movie format than an HDV 720p project, for example.
(Note: The image quality of the DV you see in QT Player may not look very good by default, but that's because its High Quality playback features need to be turned on. In QT 7, you can do it in QT preferences.)
With no discernible loss in quality?
That's correct. There will be no loss of quality.
Thanks again for your help, Karl.
You're welcome.

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I know I am coming into this thread late, but perhaps my method mirrors what the original poster is looking to do.
I too have lots of old 8mm/Hi-8 analog home movies that I wanted to be able to edit and put on DVD but also digitize and archive so I didn't have to worry about the old analog taped degrading and losing old footage. I know own a Sony Digital8 camera. When I upgraded from my old iMac (not Firewire port) to my eMac, I knew I would be doing a lot of video work, so my two first purchased after getting the eMac was upping my RAM from 256MB up to 1Gig and I purchased an external 250GB Firewire drive to store all that footage and work from.
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1) Use the digital camcorder to play back the old analog tape, digitizing and importing them into the eMac onto the external drive. Generally the tapes are two hours long so I just import the fill 2-hours (let it run unattended).
2) I then start laying down the clips on the timeline and do light editing as I go. Light editing means I don't really alter the footage, do transition or stuff that alters the original footage. My edits are simply cutting out bad stuff or overly long stuff (e.g. 10 second of my sleeping baby daughter hiccupping is cute, the full 2 minute of it I originally taped, is not!) and I will sometimes insert titles but I do it over black, not over footage. I continue this until I get an hour laid down in the timeline. So I might find it took about 1 hr 20 minutes of imported footage to get a decent hour of edited footage after removing the crud, fluff, and errors.
3) I then export this hour of footage back onto DIGITAL tape. In my case it is just HI-8 tapes but "Digital8" (aka DV) format. This is my archive.
4) This hour is then send to iDVD where I create a DVD of the same hour so the family can easily watch the old home movies. The DVD also conveniently serves as a nice index of the digital tape archive.
5) Footage that didn't get on the first hour is now moved to a new project. I name my projects "A2D#x" where "x" is whatever hour I am on. So "A2D8" is the eighth hour, the eighth digital archive tape and the 8th DVD. I then jump to number 2 above and start laying down the next hour. When I run out of footage, I then import the next analog tape (or portion of it).
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Third, I now have a digital archive version of digital tape. After a bunch of analog tape conversions, even that 250GB external drive gets full and I have to start throwing out previous stuff to make room for new stuff. The digital tapes are perfect copies so I can always import all or part of a tape later if I need it again.
Fourth, I have a easy to use DVD so we can watch old home movies and easily jump around or skip scenes. And like I said, they make nice indexes of your digital tapes. So later when I want to do more artistic projects (vs. archival work) and need clips from, for example, past vacations, I can skim thru the DVDs and look for stuff that I might want to use. When I find a scene I want later, a can simply note down on a piece of paper, "A2D#3, 22 minutes" and move onto the next DVD. When I am ready to put together the project, I know exactly which tapes to pull and exactly how far to fast forward into them to get to the footage I need.
And finally, the old analog tapes I have been bringing into work and storing there as sort of a safety backup. God forbid something awful happened, but if, say, my house burned down, I know at least I still have the old analog tapes safely in a separate location (along with DVD-ROM copies of all my digital photos). I buy TDK Hi-8/Digital8 tapes at Costco in 6-packs to archive all the digitized footage.
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