300 hours VHS --> DV --> Something Storable and Editable

[timtomahawk]

Hi, and thanks in advance for your help. I'll get straight to the point:
I have over 300 hours of home recordings on VHS and mini DV tapes which I am in the process of capturing on my iMac. My goal is to edit the footage into various compilations which I can share with family members mainly via DVD.
For right now lets concentrate on the VHS footage.

So far I've had no problem capturing the video and working with it in iMovie. I'm using a high quality VHS player with a Canopus ACDV-110 video converter to connect it to my iMac. I have a 2 Tb external RAID drive that I'm using to store the video. The problem is that by my calculations I'm going to need roughly 4.5 Tb to store to store everything at the current conversion rates.

I plan on using the footage to create many compilations in the coming years so, it is very important that I have ALL of the video footage readily ACCESSIBLE and available in an EDITABLE format. And of course I wouldn't want to reduce the quality to something less than the original VHS. So...am I stuck with the DV format or can I re-convert the video footage to a format that will take up less space, but will not restrict my editing ability?

[guns1inger]

If you can find a native mpeg2 editor for the Mac then you could look at high bitrate mpeg2 (12 - 15 Mbps), which will save you around 40%, however you would still have to re-encode it again at the end of the editing process in order to author your DVD, which may cause quality reduction.

You best option is judicious pruning early on to remove all the footage that no-one will ever need to see. You may well find that you no longer need to store 300 hours worth.