archiving footage on DVD

[Malcolm Hamilton]

Hello!

I'd love some advice!

I have a hundred-plus hours of Hi-8 family movie footage, dating back ten
years, and lately I've been worried about it degrading away on the shelf.
I'll want to edit it someday, but realistically, I won't have the time for
at least a few years - - so I want to store it, digitally, so that when I
finally do get around to editing it, it won't be all washed out, etc.

What's the best way of storing it?  Should I buy a mini-DV camera (I've been
wanting to get one anyway), and dump everything onto mini-DV tapes?  Then
it's digital, right? Which means it won't degrade anymore?  (or because it's
still tape, maybe it will?)

Or is DVD the way to go?  I'm tempted to get a 933MHz Mac, with SuperDrive,
but if I do, what would the process be?  I have a converter box (ProMax
DA-MAX+), so I could transfer from Hi-8 to what, my external firewire drive?
I just got Avid Xpress DV (apologies - this seems to be almost exclusively a
FCP list, but I had no choice) - - does the digitizing process go through
Xpress, and my internal hard drive, to my firewire drive?  If so, should I
get a bigger internal hard drive for the 933MHz machine?  Would this save a
step (and speed up the process)?
Then, is it tricky to dump this DV footage (data) onto a DVD, via
SuperDrive?  (While we're on the subject - - how long does it take to dump
this DV footage onto DVDs?).  Would I need Toast, or some other software or
hardware?  Please remember, I want to keep it as DV (and digital audio), so
I can pop these DVD's into the DVD slot of some future computer and edit
this stuff (I guess this would mean dumping it back onto a hard drive).

I've been told that each DVD will take only about a half-hour of footage!
Is there hope, on the horizon, of DVDs that will hold more?  I'm talking
100-plus hours of footage... that's maybe 250 DVDs - and if each one takes
me a half-hour of digitizing and then another half-hour of fiddling around
and then an hour to dump onto a DVD, we're talking hundreds and hundreds of
hours!!!
Is there an external model of a DVD-burner that's faster, or do the internal
ones work best?

It seems to me that just transferring the footage, camera-to-camera, is by
far the simplest.  But I've been known to overlook the obvious in the past,
so I wanted to get advice from DV people on this list.
Thankyou for any advice!!!
Malcolm