IMovie 6 Export SO SLOW!

Question

Maybe someone can help me better understand this. I'm about to start archiving all my old family videos. I already see the benefits of DV - transferring from Hi8 tapes will be a lengthy process. Anyway, I need to capture about 35 tapes. It's obvious that I won't have nearly the hard drive space I need (at nearly 1Gb per 5 minutes...), so I'll need to capture each video, edit it, and then export (share) as a file.
That's there where my problem exists. I'm using a powerful machine with files around 10 Gb's. But exporting a complete video...should it really take nearly two hours?! Why does it take so long? At that rate, I'll finish about one video a day - considering two hours to import, an hour or so to edit, and then two more hours to export. Then burning to DVD using iDVD 6, that process takes nearly another hour. Why does the computer process so slow. Even during the editing process, it's very slow to respond. I press play and it takes a while to begin playing! What's the deal?
And for the record, I have a very clean system with minimal software on it, nothing else running. Plus 2.5 Gb of RAM. Can anyone help shed some light on this?

Answer 1

You tell me that I can bypass iMovie entirely and go
straight to iDVD, but I think this is only possible
with a DV camera, correct?
Yup, it's my understanding too a DV camera is required.
I feel like
there is so much time lost by moving it into a
program, then exporting it, only to import it
somewhere else to finally get it to a DVD!
There's no avoiding importing the video, of course. That requires one hour of for each hour of video. But there's no need to export THAT video from iMovie for iDVD. iMovie has a command to share its project with iDVD, and that takes about 10 seconds. (iMovie sends iDVD a link to a tiny reference movie it prepares for iDVD.)
There is a downside to the method you've proposed, however. I've assumed you're using iDVD to burn a TV-playable DVD. That compresses the video, changing the DV of the captured video to MPEG-2. There's some loss of quality doing that, and additional loss (and considerable inconvenience) to convert it back to DV when you want to edit it.
That can be avoided by archiving the iMovie project as a DATA file on the DVD instead of using iDVD to create TV-playable DVD. Essentially, the DVD acts just like a hard drive. iMovie has a command to burn the project on a DVD, or it can be done in the Finder. When you want to edit the project you just drag the project from the DVD back to the hard disk.
There is one limitation, however. The iMovie project can be no larger than 4.6GB, the size of a DVD. So you have to limit the imported video to about 20 minutes for each project. (Burning a TV-playable DVD, on the other hand, can handle 2 hours because of the compression.)
If you use that approach be sure to set your iMovie 6 preferences to limit the length of each clip to 3 minutes or something. Then you can discard clips you don't want, empty then iMovie trash, and reduce the size of the iMovie project. Otherwise, if you import 20 minutes as a single clip, you can't reduce the size of the project. iMovie's non-destructive editing feature always preserves the entire Media file, which makes it impossible to remove a portion of the Media file.
Some of the issues discussed here might help too:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=488270&tstart=0
Karl