iMovie imports taking large amounts of HDD space

I am importing HD footage from my camcorder. It has about 60GB of space, and I imported around 2 hours and 20 minutes of video. However, it takes 115GB of HDD space on my computer. How is it taking so much space, when it couldn't have possibly taken that much space on my camcorder?

Then, what's the best way to export all this footage (I don't need to edit it, just wanted to cram together all the clips) into a reasonably sized file (one or two DVDs)?

cgbier said:

Your files on the camera are compressed. 25mbps footage expands to about 60GB/hour.
Split your movie in two separate iMove projects and share each of them to iDVD to burn them. iDVD can build DVDs up to 2 hours. If you trim the fat of your footage, you might get all your stuff onto one DVD, or you use a double layer DVD (which I would not recommend) for 4 hours total.

Click to expand...

Oh that explains it. Is there anyway to ask for it not to do this? Stuff takes an insane amount of HDD space. I also wish iMovie would tell you how big a file is going to be before you start the export, so I can change settings accordingly to assure that the file will be of the desired size.