AVCHD + iMovie, best tactics for home movies

Hey all. Thanks ahead of time for your help. Even after a decent amount of research, I'm having a hard time figuring out some of this.
I have a late-2008 13" MBP (2.4GHz ic2d), iMovie 08, a Canon Vixia HF20. My previous camera (mini-DV tape Panasonic) imported into iMovie a consistent 6.86 MB / second at 29.97 FPS and 853x480. I guess we're spoiled by the small amount of hard drive space this uses up, since we have several years of footage (unedited) on my MBP.
My daughters like to look through the unedited footage in iMovie (as a player), so it has become kind of like iTunes for our video files. Plus, who knows when we'll have the time to do editing - i.e., no time soon, if ever.
So, we're just looking for a way to continue the trend with our new Canon HF 20 camera, a gift from the grandparents. (Yes I hear you laughing knowing what is coming...)
The HD clips are super small on the actual camera, but bloat up once iMovie imports them into AIC. I've read up on this already, so I understand why now. But obviously we don't have the internal HD space to store unedited HD video with huge AIC file sizes.
I tried downloading the VLC program that was suppose to play the MTS files, but it didn't work (probably because I didn't copy over the whole folder tree/stream files from the camera, I'm guessing). Is that my best bet to keeping the file sizes down?
I've been reading up on programs that convert the AVCHD format to MP4 and DV so that iMovie can read them (the conversion process takes forever). I guess I don't understand the benefit of this. If my iMovie already can import them into AIC, why would I need a 3rd party conversion program?
Or more specifically, does using a converter program to take AVCHD to MP4 retain full HD quality but reduce file size? How about to DV format?
I'm not wild about the idea of taking 12x the clip length to convert the AVCHD files into MP4, but if that will be a one-time "suck it up" process, and we'll ultimately have small file sizes (yet full HD quality), I can see the value there.
We're not tied to using iMovie (we don't even edit really, we're just using it as a player/organizer right now). *So I guess our goal is to keep file sizes down so we can (ideally) have all our unedited video on my MBP for view-any-time fun... all the while retaining HD quality if we ever (way in the future) want to edit it.*
Sheessh, it's just home movies. Got so complicated so fast.
I do have an ASUS G73JH (i7-720QM, Win7), and I read AVCHD is native to Win7, but I'd really like to avoid using the PC for the videos.

Thank you so much for responding. But my questions aren't really about archiving the raw AVCHD/MTS format (which I believe I can already do right now using Disk Utility or my PC).
The issue is that we still want to play/view the unedited HD files on the Mac, but need to keep the file sizes down (so AIC format is out of the question). I guess my questions can be summarized as follows:
*1) How can we simply view/play the raw AVCHD files on the Mac, while (a) keeping the file sizes down, and (b) maintaining the HD quality to do some editing in the (very) distant future?*
I tried the VLC Media Player program, but it didn't work (even with the entire folder tree from the camera).
*2) Does converting the AVCHD format into MP4 (or DV) result in a loss of video quality?*
My couple tests doing this (with AVCHD Converter program) took forever to do the conversion to MP4, but ended up with very small file sizes as well as file types that Mac could play. It was hard to tell, but it looked like the video quality went down. I have not tried converting to DV yet.
*3) If you are trying to retain the most video quality while keeping the file size as small as possible, is it better to convert AVCHD format to MP4 or DV?*
*4) Is the conversion from AVCHD to DV/MP4 quicker based on CPU?*
VoltaicHD, for example, says it takes 12 times as long as the original footage to convert the clip, but it didn't mention the CPU. If I did the conversion on my i7 quadcore PC, would it all go faster?

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I'm new to iMovie (and the mac) and have started importing all my home movies from my camcorder into iMovie. I quickly realized that movies take a huge amount of disk space and it may or may not be reasonable to import all my movies and keep them on the hard disk in .dv format. At 12GB/Hour I would need 1.2 Terabytes of storage (plus backup). If that is the best workflow, i'm happy to invest in a few terabytes of storage and back up. But before I do that, I want to check to see if there is a different workflow I should follow given my use case.
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I have 100 hours of 8mm and miniDV tapes already and plan to continue creating more.
I want to import them all into the iMac for ease of organization, searching for the clips of interest, and watch them either on my iMAC and also on my TV (via TIVO).
I may do some editing, but this is not a big priority for me at this time. I may do more editing in the distant future when I have more time. My editing for now will be limited to rejecting portions of clips I don't want.
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Should I maintain my event library in .dv format? (and bite the bullet on the storage)
Or is the .dv format intended only for temporary editing and users are expected to compress into another format after editing? if so, what format and which tool is recommended? (keeping in mind that I want to view the clips via Tivo and Roxio/Toast).
If I need to byte the bullet and invest in storage, my quick math suggests I'll need about 2 terabytes for the library and 2 more for back up for a total of 4 terabytes!?. Is a RAID system recommended for this? (I was surprised that the Apple store did not carry such a system, so perhaps that is not the best option). What would you recommend?
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I am in a similar mode, though about half as much existing DV footage.
+Should I maintain my event library in .dv format? (and bite the bullet on the storage)+
Short answer, yes; long answer:
I did "bite the bullet" since 1T drives are at or just over $100. I'm using a MacBook Pro so I bought an 2 port eSATA card for my cardbus slot ($34), and a 1T eSATA/Firewire/USB drive ($119). I don't plan to "back up" as I am not going to get rid of my Mini DV tapes/vhs/analog tapes, etc. Those will be in an off-site dark cool closet elsewhere. I don't want to do RAID or such as it still puts everything in the same drive unit, in the same location. Basically I'm splitting my video import to two different physical drives. So if lightning, thieves, personal incompetence or whatever strikes, there's more chance it'll only affect one of the drives. I've thought about a Drobo, which you might consider. It is unique device that offers a spin on RAID that offers some advantages.
Everything I read here on these boards suggests that it is best to grab the source video in the original format whenever possible. Since storage is cheap, makes sense to me.
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Thanks so much Karsten. So the fact I'm doing all this now is basically a culmination of (a) old mini-DV technology which meant dealing with the tapes was a hassle for many years (b) Mom & Dad just taking alot of video of alot of the kids, family trips, births, parties, first day's of school, etc. over about a 15+ year period and (c) Now that we finally have the technology to start to deal with all these tapes WITHOUT making DVDs (I tried several years ago, just way to time intensive) and we have big hard drive technology relatively cheaply, I'm trying to tackle this.
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Anybody got a quick recipe for making a clip look
like old Super 8 home movie?
Guessing frame rate around 12-18 fps or so, but how
'bout some way to add
scratches and weave?
Be nice if there were a plug in...or did I miss it?
Can't recall if there's something maybe in After
Effects or not.
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Hi,
A vendor offers a "1560x1080p HD" transfer of home movie film to one of 4 formats.
We'd like to preserve as much useful information as possible in case the very old film deteriorates, but also would consider editing in future. The choices:
High Definition Quicktime Motion JPEG-A - 50GB per hour
High Definition Quicktime Component video ~ 290GB per hour
High Definition Quicktime Animation ~ 370GB per hour
High Definition Quicktime Raw ~ 490GB per hour
They suggest Motion JPEG-A as a "a very good compromise between high quality images and a reasonable data rate" for most users."
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This is fine if you have sufficient disk space available. However, there is quite a range of data rates here. Motion JPEG would allow about 19 hours of content to be stored per TB of storage space available while RAW reduces that amount to less than 2 hours. Since it is likely you would want to use this format for long-term archival storage, whatever drive(s) you you use to hold the data would be, more or less, "dedicated" to this purposed for as long as you intend to hold onto the data. Further, it you want to protect the data by RAID redundancy, these storage capacities could be reduced by as much as half-- i.e., less than one hour of RAW content per TB of drive space to less than 10 hours of RAW compressed video. So one very important question is how many hours of content are you talking about and how many drives/drive systems are you willing to dedicate to the non-temporary storage of your content.
I have no video editing experience (outside of fumbling with MPEG Streamclip).
MPEG Streamclip is a very handy utility and works fine for cutting and merging segments. However, if you plan to add titles, transitions, layer addition sound tracks, work with theme styles, or apply "motion" effects, then you will likely want to do your editing in a dedicated video editing app. And, since iMovie is probably already available to you on your current system, it would likely be something you will "play" with at some time or another in conjunction with the content mentioned. Hover, if this is the case, you will not want to re-compress the files for editing in the iMovie '08 (or later) app. As previously mentioned, the "new" version of iMovie does not like the Animation codec. And, which it will accept and "edit" the content, when exported by iMovie, it produces a "black" display output and would not, therefor be a viable option for "native" iMovie editing. (Am assuming Apple still has not "fixed" this problem in the most recently released update but have not personally checked on this since this version only runs on an Intel platform and I do most of my editing on an old PPC G5 model.) Again, just a "heads up" in case you plan to go this route.
Current use of the transferred film might be to trim/edit segments to burn standard SD DVDs. I suppose the most far-out use of these 1080p files would be to make HD Bluray discs - in a future where both my Mac has a burner and my TV a player.
As previously indicated, SD DVDs would most likely limit your final encodings to 720x480 MPEG-2/AC3 or MPEG-2/PCM burns, any of the stated target compression formats would more than suffice. Further, even a 50 GB/hour format equates to something on the order of 110 Mbps or about 8 times what is typically used for SD Motion JPEG and should, as indicated, provide adequate "headroom" for "visual perception" equivalents. (I.e., your final quality will likely depend more on the quality of your source films than on the codec you select.) In fact, if the source fils are of really good quality, you may even be able to create short HD videos and burn them to DVD using the latest version of Toast. Of course, you would still need an HD player to view them. (There are, however, other issues with color sampling/space which may or may not be significant to you.)
In my case, the ease of work flow is just as important as the quality of the final product. The MJPEG format, in addition to requiring less non-temporary storage space (i.e., fewer drives/systems), also is, I believe, one of the formats that "thumbnail" most quickly in iMovie (and/or GarageBand). This may or may not be important to you as far as editing goes. As previously stated, it is also a video format that is native edit compatible with all versions of iMovie. As such, given what you've said thus far, I would lean toward recommending it as the more suitable compression format at this point.

AVCHD + iMovie, best tactics for home movies

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