Getting iMovie file to fit on DVD

I have a 1 hr 12 minute iMovie file with video clips, audio, some titles and stills that is 14.47 G total. When I use "create a DVD" I get the "duration is too long"message. I have made sure (following Karl Petersen's advice) to have ONLY the video clips I want in the iMovie file. I exported all clips to Full Quality Quicktime, deleted all clips in the iMovie file, re-imported the .dv files to get my final movie file. I also set the iDVD prefs to Best Quality, not Best performance.
From searching this forum, I read that a movie that is 1 hr 55 minutes should fit on a 4.7 G DVD. The capacity status pane in iDVD shows 4.8 G.
My question (which is obvious already, I'm sure) is what is happening? The file is only 1 hr 12 min long, including everything. My original file after converting from analog to digital was 14.96 G, so it went down a little, to 14.47 G. Seems crazy to split this into 2 DVDs.
When a video is converted from analog to digital, what settings should it have in regards to bit rate, etc? I'm new to this (like lots of people I use an old Formac unit to convert the video VHS tape to digital using NTSC, about 30 frames per second, high performance (but not best), and no compression. Not sure if any of this is helpful or not to my situation.
If there is a comprehensive answer already out there, I'd love to know. thanks for the help!

A few hours sleep and things are starting to look up! Thanks everyone for the help and suggestions!
I did check the QT show movie info (thanks Hui!) and it shows the file as being 21.88GB. Yikes! The resolution is 720 x 480, 48kHz, 16 bit, NTSC. When I look at the movie in QT it shows it as being over 2 hours long, with the second hours' worth just being white screen. When I look at the exact same, unadulterated file in iMovie it only shows the 1 hr movie. When the playhead reaches the 1 hour 17 min mark, it skips back to the beginning of the movie. Therefore, I was not able to "see" and thus remove anything in iMovie that corresponds to the white screen time I found when playing the file in QT.
Now, I have no idea why there is and extra hour in QT, or why QT info shows the "true" data size of the file and it doesn't show up anywhere else, but my solution (trying it anyway to see if it works) is to convert the movie again (done), check the data size in QT (turns out to be 14 GB, yeah!) and import it back to a new iMovie file (next thing to do). Hope this works!
QUESTIONS: What resolution do people usually use when converting video to DV? Does the resolution of the original VHS recording impact the resolution when it is converted to DV?
Also, Joel, I would like more info on the AVI Divx for storing raw footage files. I am crammed tight for space and need room to maneuver on my hard drives. Could you point me to a web site with info?
Thanks everyone!! I can breathe again!

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I have a formac converter, but don't know how to get the connections to tape FROM the computer.
any help very much appreciated...
-James

Hi James:
Welcome
You can use the DV camera that it was taped with as a pass thru to the VHS.
*Plug the camera into the wall (don't use the battery for this)
*Connect camera to mac with 4-pin to 6-pin Firewire cable
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I finally made my file and its way too big to fit on a DVD, is there any other compression I can do to get this to fit on a dvd, or possibly a dual layer disc? It took about 2 days to get this working file so if I have to start over I might cry a little any ideas? thanks

The simple answer is No, you can not fit 18GB of material on a DVD.
In a nut shell - a standard single layer DVD-5 disk will hold ~ 4.5 GB of data which effectively translates to ~2 hrs of video + ac3 audio at reasonable bit rates. You can hold more time but you have to reduce the bit rate of the video so low, the image quality will likely decrease to a level most may find problematic.
A dual layer DVD-9 disk will hold ~double the material of a DVD-5.
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x

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besides:
try to edit a little more, 120min is max. for socalled single-layer dvd-r media... could be, that iDVD asks for a double-layer media (fits 240min), but these are much more expansive...
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Here is an article that can help you troubleshoot this issue with burning DVDs in iDVD:
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http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1583
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iDVD encodes (compresses) the video before burning
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Getting iMovie file to fit on DVD

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