Newbie help with workflow

[Grasher]

I'm getting more into digital video now that my new dslr has this functionality. The problem I have is that I'm not sure of the best way workflow for editing, saving clips and saving final movies. With my photography I have a nice smooth Aperture workflow set up which I'm happy with but video - no idea!

1. At the moment I'm storing all the raw footage on the internal HD of my MBP and it's filling up fast! I know I need to go external but is my 1TB USB2 drive fast enough or do I need to go the FW800 route?

2. Once I've finished editing and have the movie put together I'll usually burn it to DVD with iDVD (I'm mainly doing family movies of my kids to send to my parents overseas). How do I store the finished project locally, and in what format? An apple tv is on the shopping list so being able to access using this would be good.

On the software front I'm using iMovie 11 for now.

Thanks!

 

[simsaladimbamba]

An external HDD is better, as properly transcoded footage using Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC) as video codec (the codec iMovie uses) can take up to 49GB per hour of video footage.
It is best to get a Firewire 800 HDD, as USB 2.0 is slower and also uses CPU cycles, but FW has its own chip, thus no CPU is used for Firewire transactions.

I don't know what you mean by "project" in regard to iDVD, but you can make a copy of the final DVD via Disk Utility.
How To Make Copies of DVDs

 

[cgbier]

I normally store my stuff locally as 1280x720 h.264. iMovie should be able to get that out.

 

[Soura2112]

Apple TV

Not sure how new you are FYI, there have been rumors of a new Apple TV, so you may want to wait a bit. Apple TV is great for family projects and handbreak, and lots of other stuff.
Like mentioned, I would go with FireWire 800 and h.264.

 

[Grasher]

I don't know what you mean by "project" in regard to iDVD, but you can make a copy of the final DVD via Disk Utility.
How To Make Copies of DVDs

I don't mean project in any real technical sense - just the particular movie that I'm working on. I guess the simplest way sounds like burning to DVD to share with family and to H264 for keeping myself for the Apple TV.


On the hard drive front, is there a particular speed that I should be aiming for? I know faster is better, but is there a point where the cost vs performance balances out reasonably?

 

[cgbier]

7200 rpm is the affordable standard. You talking photography - you have one of them there video DSLR? Then I would even think of a small RAID cluster if you have more than one or two tracks to work on.
It should be in any case FW800.