Archiving DV

[Edwin Chee]

I understand that for full quality DV back-up (archiving), today's 4.7 
GB DVD-R technology is not optimal as one hour of DV takes up 12-13 GB 
storage space.  Perhaps with new blue laser DVD technology we will have 
an ideal archival solution in the near future.

That being said, I still want to back-up my one hour Mini-DV tapes onto 
4.7 GB DVD-R disks.  After overhead, a blank DVD-R stores about 4.28 
GB.  Currently, I am importing the DV into iMovie 3 and manually 
splitting the video at 21:00 for a file size of 4.22 GB segments and 
exporting this into Quicktime "Full Quality DV".  Each hour mini-DV 
tape will fit onto 3-4 DVD-R disks.

Does anyone have a script or an efficient workflow that they have used 
for this purpose?  Am I losing any quality by exporting to QT?  I'd 
welcome any input for a better solution.


Edwin