Any way to reduce size of captured DV?

Some people may like to dispute your claim that HD low fidelity is good enough for DVD as some had stuck with iMovie HD6 just for this feature. Having said that, the DV format provides loseless compression so the dub you make from DV tape to computer and back is faithful and same. The only way to shrink them is to capture them first and then finalize the project by exporting to H.264 which will make it smaller but also loose some quality. Since you accept the quality of the DVD from low fidelity HD clips, then I think you will accept H.264 compressed too.

When you dub tape to tape in analog fashion, there will be a generational lost. But when you dub your VHS tape over to DV, you stop the generational lost on the DV side. There's really nothing to do with DV's high resolution, but rather because it is digital. When you do DV to DV dubbing either by tape or computer, there will be little to no image degradation. Except perhaps tape age, stretching and DV transport misalignment (head and tape speed) which is a common thing with DV decks and camcorders!

DV is a loseless compression format which retains the original video image. If you want to shrink your DV, you'll loose quality. Video images will look softer, noisier and with compression artifacts. If you plan to edit, then finalize the project and then burn it to DVD, then you need to do a few transcoding and perhaps recompressions. If your source video is pristine, sharp and clear -- I say go for it. How much do you value your original clips?

Secondly, there is no easy way to automate this process unless you own a PC. I have a very fast Quad Core PC to do this flanked with RAID drives. There is also a faster way to do this using a hardware accelerator on the Mac (elgato Turbo H.264) but both ways are gonna cost you!

Best way to do this is buy something like a hard disk dock (Thermaltake Blacx) and store your footage in a bare 1Tb drive. The initial outlay on the Thermaltake is not a lot. Then, bare drives are cheap. This way, you'll be able to save the DV stream, which in effect is the same as your original DV tape.
When you finalize the project via share to media browser, the quality will be way better than when you transcoded and compressed the original DV clips to something else. Compressing DV clips is a high computational task, so unless you have an extremely fast Quad core i5/i7 or Turbo H.264HD, you're probably better off copying DV stream clips to a hard drive. At 13Gb/per hour, you can copy a DV stream over USB 2.0 faster than transcoding the same clip using Handbrake to H.264.

And YES, share to Media Browser works well with iMovie 11 to make good looking DVDs.

I answered your other post in the iMovie 11 discussion.

USB 2.0 is fast enough to capture the DV stream. The DV video has a data rate of 25Mbits/s and 1.5Mbits/s for audio. USB 2.0 has up to 480Mbits/s bandwidth. The problem you were having before is probably due to latency with your old Mac rather than the drive itself. With your Core i5 system, this is no longer an issue. Even my Core 2 Duo Macbook can handle and save the stream no problem onto a USB 2.0 enclosed laptop 2.5" 5400 RPM SATA drive. But I don't use iMovie to do this. I use an excellent standalone program called "Vidi" http://mitzpettel.com/. This link will take you there. It's so simple. If works exactly like a tape recorder dubber! The saved file(s) will be in a Quicktime DV container. This is as good as your tape, but now you can store many tapes inside a 1TB drive.

Hope this helps..

I have done the same excercise - Taken some 150 1Hr DV tapes and imported them onto Hard Drives for future archiving when I won't have anything to play my old MiniDV Tapes. After quite a lot of research I chose iMovie06 to run the whole archiving for me and save each tape as a movie. You can skim through easily, capture date and time are preserved and the project can be imported into any newer iMovie Application or Final Cut Express.

Perhaps if I'd known about this Vidi I might have used that - Worth investigating, but I like the idea that iMovie saves a new clip for every time I start and stop recording, and even without the application, all of my individual video clips are stored as movie files in the Media Folder inside the iMovie Project folder so they can always be copied / transferred / used,

The downside, sure - 13GB per hour. But the value of uncompressed footage is I think worth it - Once you start introducing lossy processing, a few generations down the line you'll regret not keeping your original footage. A 1TB hard drive can be bought here in the UK for around £50, although with any archive system, you'll need a back up, so that's two drives for £100, but I think it still represents value and should only get cheaper. It will also save you a heap of time as conversion and compression is a long processor intensive task.

One more thing, I don't know if I'm kidding myself, but I tend to do my first import to a (more expensive) Firewire Drive just to avoid any data transfer issues, and then clone that whole drive to a cheaper USB 1TB drive for archiving. Not sure if that is really necessary but for £120ish I've got 75 hours (around 7 years) of full quality family videos copied, archived and backed up and I still have the original archived tapes in case both the drives fail.

Guy,

USB 2.0, though faster in theory to FW400, requires the host computer to do the low level protocol stuff. Whereas with Firewire, it delegates that to the interface devices which require little to no main host CPU intervention. So this practise was true when we are talking G3, G4 or perhaps G5 machines, so it was more efficient to transfer Firewire to Firewire rather than Firewire, jump to host and then back to USB 2.0.

The newer Intel processors of today are much more powerful, efficient and faster than those older PowerPC processors which makes even an inefficient USB 2.0 fly or USB 3.0. I have USB 2.0 on my fast Quad PC and its avg transfer rate is only about 5-7MB/s slower than my Core 2 Duo with a FW400 drive which had already hit the theoretical limit of about 40MB/s. This is more than enough to capture a DV stream. DV bit stream of 25Mbit/s is roughly translated to 3.2MB/s, which is low enough that USB 2.0 drives can handle. The only rule of thumb that still holds true with Firewire drives is the editing and rendering part, which Firewire 400 or even 800 are recommended. In fact, just to render a nicely stabilized footage using Virtual DeShaker (PC software) back to uncompressed AVI from a DV stream file, a RAID 0 array of about 200MB/s sustained is needed to do this or you get jerky video and stuttered audio with anything slower. And that array is tweaked to "Short Stroke" to maintain high sustained rate! Same with multi-stream AVCHD footage too. But for basic storage, USB 2.0 is fine.