Home Movie Cataloging - BEST PRACTICES

Question

I have about 200 hours of old home movies on VHS which I am in the process of adding to my iMac. I am wondering about 'best practices' on how much video can be stored inside of iMovie '08, when how much video becomes too much inside of the program, etc.
In a perfect world, I'd like to simply import all of my home videos into iMovie, leave them in the 'library' section, and make 2-5 minute long clips in the 'projects' section for sharing with family members, but never deleting anything from the 'library'. Is this a good way to store original data? Would it be smarter to export all of the original video content to .DV files or something like that for space saving, etc?
Can I use iMovie to store and catalog all of my old home movies in the same way I use iPhoto to store ALL of my photos, and iTunes to store ALL of my music/hollywood-movies, etc?

Answer 1

We-ell, since no-one else has replied:
1 hour of DV (digital video in the file system which iMovie uses) needs 13GB of hard disc space.
You have 200 hours of video. 200 x 13 = 2,600 gigabytes. Two point six terabytes. If you put all that on one-and-a-bit 2TB hard discs, and a hard disc fails - oops! - where's your backup? ..Ah, on another one-and-a-bit 2TB hard discs ..or, preferably, spread over several hard discs, so that if one fails you haven't lost everything!
iMovie - the program - can handle video stored on external discs. But are you willing to pay the price for those discs? If so; fine! Digitise all your VHS and store it on computer discs (prices come down month by month).
Yes, you can "mix'n'match" clips between different projects, making all sorts of "mash-ups" or new videos from all the assorted video clips. But you'll need more hard disc space for the editing, too. You could use your iMac's internal hard disc for that ..or use one of the external discs for doing the editing on. That's how professionals edit: all the video "assets" on external discs, and edit onto another disc. That's what I do with my big floorstander PowerMac, or whatever those big cheesegraters were called..
So the idea's fine, as long as you have all the external storage you'd need, plus the backup in case one of those discs fails, and all the time and patience to digitise 200 hours of VHS.
Note that importing from VHS will import material as one long, continuous take - there'll be no automatic scene breaks between different shots - so you'll have to spend many hours chopping up the material into different clips after importing it.
Best way to index that? Dunno; there have been several programs which supposedly do the job for you (..I can't remember their names; I've tried a few: find them by Googling..) but they've been more trouble - and taken up more disc space - than I've been prepared to bother with. I'd jot down the different clips as you create them, either by jotting in TextEdit (simplest) or in a database or spreadsheet program such as Excel or Numbers or similar ..or even in a notebook.
Jot down the type of footage (e.g; 16th Birthday party), name of clip (e.g; 016 party), duration (e.g; 06:20 mins and seconds) and anything else you might need to identify each clip.
Best of luck!