IMovie11 "preparing project"

Hi,
When I export my iMovie project 11 (about 1 hour recording) to folder (movies) iMac - OS X Lion 10.7.5, iMovie starts "preparing the project" (this is the way I learned when I want to export video for my Pro miDVD). However, iMovie spends on average 5 hours. It's a long time! My videos in HD with Sony's mini-cassette, are performed by a Canon Vixia HV30 - HDV.
Why does it take so long this "project preparation"?
Thanks,
Gionei

Thanks for the reply.
I figured out the issue and it was with iDVD and that, unlike iMovie HD, which integrates with iDVD, iMovie '08 and '09 do not, so iMovie now has to export the completely rendered movie before iDVD can use it. Also, when you Share the movie with iDVD, it defaults the new iDVD project to you user folder, and then imports the entire iMovie video into the iDVD project. So, that is why all my system HDD space was disappearing.
So, I guess the best thing to do, if I use iMovie to create the video, is export the final movie to the scratch drive, and then create a new iDVD project (saved to the Scratch drive) and then drag the exported movie into iDVD.
My only problem with this method is that my chapter marks get lost on the export (same as XML). Is there an option to export a movie and maintain the chapters in the video (a la FCP export)?
The main reason I am using iMovie is that I am walking through others that only have iMovie to work with, so using FCP is not an option.
Thanks.

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