I'm in an HD mess on my Mac - Help!

[Jason.Teets]

I have four hours of raw HD footage (1080p30) I dumped into iMovie. I have Final Cut Studio, but because I'm already working on a wedding there, and because this 4-hours of footage was just going to be raw footage for the client, all I really need to do is author some discs. I didn't think it would be a huge issue.

This is my first HD authoring, and I'm already learning of things the hard way. My first option was to buy an external Blu-ray Burner, and burn the 4-hours to a dual-layer 50gb Blu-ray disc... but I find out that the client actually wants the footage on DVD, even if that means down-converting it to SD.

Down-converting seems to be my only option, but I'm still concerned about how many DVDs it's going to take to hold the 4-hours of raw footage. Also, I'm not sure if this is normal, but my computer is estimating a 12 hour time until completion for exporting the iMovie HD footage as a quicktime movie. Does anyone have any ideas about the best codec to export as? After this, I'm not sure if I'm going to offer raw footage on DVD any longer... it's just a mess. The main thing I need is to get all 4-hours on as many DVDs as it will take...

Thanks for helping!

[HankCastello]

I have no Mac; iMovie; nor FCP experience, but I'll bet you have options to capture the footage as standard, which would hasten the encoding job greatly.

[DavidPartington]

What was the original codec used on the footage before you imported to iMovie?

What codec is iMovie trying to export to?

Even though you are in Final Cut for another project, what is stopping you running the new footage through Compressor in the background?  It can take the HD footage and give you SD footage without even blinking.   It can also use more CPU cores to speed things up, whereas iMovie may not be multicore aware (depending on the version).

4 hours is too much for one DVD, even if you compress for MPEG 2 at a reasonable bit rate 'for DVD playback'. If you need the footage for editing then compressing for DVD playback is not ideal since it introduces lots of artifacts.

It's a while since I worked with SD / DV footage, but my recollection was something in the order of 13GB/hr. 

So, my first question to the customer would be :

1) What are you going to do with the footage?  (i.e. edit it) - This will determine how much you can compress it
2) What codecs can you accept? - h.264 can do an incredible job of reducing the size but not everyone can use it - it may even be small enough to FTP.
3) What other media types can they accept - i.e. 16GB / 32GB USB memory sticks?  USB hard disk?  These are pretty cheap now (and you can charge for it).
4) What about dropping it back to DV tape and deliver tapes?
5) What about them giving you a hard disk to drop it on to?

Sorry if I misunderstood the problem - I'm assuming you need to give them raw footage on disc (for them to edit) rather than a finished piece.