Hi there,

1. Did you originate the material on tape- miniDV etc. If you did then I suggest that you transfer your edited material back to tape. As things stand this is the most stable, protectable and technically certain back-up available. Yoy can then simply redigitise the tapes when you want to copy to DVD.

2. There is no advantage in saving files as Final Cut project files, unless you use Final Cut as your primary editing tool. Final Cut works on video as Quicktime files anyway, and Quicktime is readable by all formats (you may have to download for PC).

3. There is no advantage in doing anything else extra to what you get on a Mac. Export your edited material to Quicktime at highest quality, then import the Quicktime file to IDVD. It will do all conversions you need. What happens when you try to do it? What goes wrong exactly?

4. Video is very memory hungry. You won't get much on an ordinary CD, you will need to change the format of your video files. Again, I movie has options for you to do this.

5. It's important to remember that the Quicktime files are the important things to back up. The timeline of I movie or even FCP may only be 100Mb or so. The Quicktime files that the timeline refers to may be 50Gb plus.

6. Largish portable Hard Drives (500Gb plus) are relativly cheap and pretty stable for second line storage. If you use this as a 'scratch drive' all the media files will save on this, leaving your macbooks memory for projects.

You will probably note that I've suggested backing up on three different formats- tape, DVD, portable hard drive. I don't trust any of them on their own. And I would never trust any back up I couldn't carry around with me!

Hope this helps.