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New here...help please!

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I have been reading forever and think I understand what to do, but could use some help. I will be editing with iMovie '11 on a fairly new Macbook Pro.

To begin with, my main goal is to preserve the home videos I have taken of my 21-month-old. I have a combination of clips from my iphone as well as my Panasonic HDC-SD60 camcorder.

I understand that the only way I can get actual HD footage on a disk is to burn it onto a blu-ray. I do not currently have a blu-ray burner.

If I burn onto a regular DVD at the best quality possible, how much worse is it going to look than an HD blu-ray? Ideally, I would like to be able to just get everything edited, burn a few copies of DVDs and then not worry about the raw footage anymore. However, my other concern is being able to preserve the footage for years to come, so I am then wondering if it is worthwhile for me to keep the raw footage stored and if so, what is the best way to do that?

To summarize, I guess these are the options I am looking at:

1. Burn to DVD at the best quality possible and not worry about storing the raw footage.
2. Burn to Blu-Ray in HD (would have to get blu-ray burner and software) and not worry about storing the raw footage.
3. Option 1 or 2 and store the raw footage, but how?

Hope this isn't too confusing. Any feedback is appreciated!
 
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chas_m

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Since your original footage is in HD, I would strongly recommend that you preserve it for future use. Storage on external HD or even flash drives is ludicrously cheap at present.

Standard DVD resolution is less than half the resolution of HD footage (720x480 for SD compared to 1920x1080 for 1080p), so you WILL want to create an HD version of this footage someday.

You can create standard DVDs now using programs like Burn (free) or Roxio's Toast (~$70, but read on). You can also upload your HD movie to services like YouTube (in private mode) to preserve it there, and with an Apple TV (for example) could see it anytime you like on your HDTV. Others who know the password for the private video could watch it at their convenience as well.

Roxio's Toast ALSO has the ability to create a Blu-Ray disc if you have a Blu-Ray recorder, so you can investigate that option as well.
 
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Thank you for your response. Couple last questions. Once I edit my clips into 1 project, is there any reason that I have to save ALL of the original HD clips? Can I just export the project in Full HD and burn that to a data blu-ray and/or external hard drive?

Also, is it going to create any problems that I will be mixing full HD clips with clips taken from my iphone? The iPhone does not shoot in Full HD, corect?
 
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chas_m

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To answer your questions in order, iMovie has a built-in feature to "consolidate" the clips you've actually used in your project and trash the clips you didn't use or marked as unwanted.

You can definitely export your project in full HD to a variety of formats for eventual conversion and burning to Blu-Ray. I don't know much about that end of things, others may have some suggestions on how best to do that. Basically I would create two exports: an SD one and an HD one.

The iPhone 4 shoots 720p HD video, the iPhone 4S and of course the 5 shoot 1080p (FullHD) video. So it depends on what iPhone you have to answer whether it will be noticeable that you're mixing clips (resolution wise).
 

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