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I have hundreds of GBs of home video on an external hard drive, and I'm nervous to have all my eggs in one electronic basket.

I want to back up the video in the best way(s) possible.

Ideally I would like to burn DVDs (not data DVDs), but I don't have time to make fancy, edited videos.

Is there a quick and dirty way to back these up onto DVDs (watchable in a DVD player)? The process of imovie to iDVD to disc seems to take forever. Or should I simply make data DVDs?

If I use imovie, how many minutes of footage should I put on each DVD? My newer video is HD; older video isn't.

I bought a second hard drive and copied the home videos to it, but now both drives are filling up (1.5 TB) and I feel there must be a better way!

Thank you for any advice!!

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Hi Petalutha & welcome to the forums!

Unfortunately, the DVD spec is one of compressed video format... in short, this means you'll need to convert your movies to the correct DVD format (which is not high definition) in order for them to be playable on a set top DVD player.

I think your best bet will be to use iMovie & iDVD to burn DVD-video discs.

If you make a Data DVD, the files on the discs can be read on a computer but not by consumer DVD players.

Thanks
Rounik

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Thank you, that was my understanding. I was just hoping there was a 'fast' way to make the DVDs.

Approximately how much video should I plan on putting on each DVD? I know there are different compression sizes, and I don't want to lose much quality.

I've heard an hour, but I don't know if that includes space needed by iDVD for menu coding.

Thanks!

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Hi,

You're correct, using lower quality compression will give you more "time" or space on a DVD-Video disc.

For decent quality video you should be able to fit upto 2 hours of footage. The more stills, motion graphics in menus etc a DVD has the less actual footage you'll be able to fit on.

Hope that helps,
Rounik