iMovie '08 Video Cataloging - BEST PRACTICES

[fivepoint]

I have about 200 hours of old home movies on VHS which I am in the process of adding to my iMac. I am wondering about 'best practices' on how much video can be stored inside of iMovie '08, when how much video becomes too much inside of the program, etc. Can I simply import ALL of my videos into iMovie '08 and use it to organize them all, just like iPhoto and iTunes... or are the files just to big and not worth hit? I want all of my old home movies to be stored and secured in digital format, and off of those old decomposing VHS tapes!

In a perfect world, I'd like to simply import all of my home videos into iMovie, leave them in the 'library' section, and make 2-5 minute long clips in the 'projects' section for sharing with family members, but never deleting anything from the 'library'. Is this a good way to store original data? Would it be smarter to export all of the original video content to .DV files or something like that for space saving, etc?

Can I use iMovie to store and catalog all of my old home movies in the same way I use iPhoto to store ALL of my photos, and iTunes to store ALL of my music/hollywood-movies, etc?

 

[reclusivemonkey]

I'm certainly not an expert, and someone more knowledgeable may advise you otherwise, but you can import and catalogue all your video in iPhoto. iMovie simply looks to iPhoto for movies by default. It seems to me that iPhoto is much more geared up to cataloguing media than iMovie. For example, you don't have things like keywords and smart albums in iMovie, which will help you a great deal in iPhoto, especially if you have a lot of video.

For what its worth (I'm new to the Mac world), I would use iPhoto and then just use iMovie to actually make the movies you want.