Saving Projects

Question

I plan to produce about 20 DVD projects. They will fill my HD. I want to make a Project, then store it off the computer, then erase it from my computer HD (including the inputs that made it) to have room to start the next.
I have these options for saving Projects.
(1) External HD (It will fill quickly depending on how much space a Disk Image takes)
(2) DVD (I do not know how long DVD's last in storage)
(3) Play the DVD from the computer onto Hi 8 digital tape (the original video and audio was played from the camera into the computer)
These are DVD's of infant Baptism, likely to be viewed 20-30 years from now.
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Prior to iDVD I shot the Baptism in Hi 8, played the tape to a VHS copy deck (up to 2 hours), did almost no editing, and made VHS tape copies. The original Hi 8 tape I store and give the VHS tapes. It is fast and easy, but the product is not editied and has no "themes".
15" G4 Powerbook, 1.67, 2 gig RAM, 80 gig HD   Mac OS X (10.4.6)  
15" G4 Powerbook, 1.67, 2 gig RAM, 80 gig HD   Mac OS X (10.4.6)  

Answer 1

OK basically you have two different things to consider. The original video footage that you want to preserve and possibly be able to edit later (maybe to add a piece of it to a project detailing the life of someone for example) and then there is the iDVD generated final DVD project, which should be considered a viewing medium only.
Actually I am very much in the same boat as you as I work through a library of old analog Hi8 tapes that I have been importing to iMovie via a Digital8 camcorder. Even with a large external drive, I run out of space and have to clear out previous imports to make room for new ones. So I can not store everything on my hard drive(s) yet (until they get bigger and cheaper). So after importing the analog tape, I do very basic editing (remove errors, shorten overly long scenes, etc.). Once I have an hour's worth of footage ready to go, I then export it back to Digital8 tape as my archive. Tape is cheap and at $2+ dollars a tape, this is short money to preserve my kids baby videos and other family footage. So now I have my new digital master and the old analog is a backup. I then also go to iDVD to create a viewable DVD for the family to be able to pull out and watch, with chapters and everything. Sure beats the old dubbing from Hi8 tape to a VHS tape and watching that!
Now if you want to make a copy of the finished DVD on your hard drive, you can create a disk image which will be the size of a DVD, roughly 4+GB per DVD. Round up to 5GB and you can fit a decent number of these images onto a large external drive. For example, a standard 250GB drive (cheap these days) would, allowing for formatting loss and filling to no more than about 85% of capacity, would hold about 40 DVD images. You can then create additional copies of a DVD from the disk image. But, keep in mind that the DVD is the compressed version and should be considered the viewable version, not the editable version.
If you want to be able to edit in the future, the archive back to digital tape than can be reimported is one way, or with enough hard drive space you can simply keep your iMovie projects saves, but that eat up tons of room (13GB per hour project vs. 5GB for an hour DVD). For now tape is a good way to keep this footage and then when something better comes along that is cheap enough & holds LOTS of gigs, we can migrate our master tapes to that format. But for the short term, that being the next several years, this works out well since you can still purchase new Digital8 camcorders (should ours fail).
Patrick