I have 14 gigs free space on my HDD and 16 Gigs on a external HD.

Let's say I have an hour video file I want to edit, that's already 13 gigs, so I decide to:

1. put only half an hour of it (6 or so gigs) onto my PC.

2. Edit that half an hour to around 10 minutes.

3. Export those edited 10 minutes to a file.

4. Delete the source footage.

5. Repeat 1, 2, 3, and 4, only with the next half an hour.

6. I then have 2 edited files that I just edit together to make one complete movie... That's quite a good idea, but the question is:

What format to do I render the 2 10 minute files to? If I export to uncompressed AVI those 2 files will be like 20 gigs. Is there anyway to export to DVAVI so those 10 minutes will be like a gig each without losing the quality of the source footage?

Sorry for the stupid question, I'm new to DV.

As long as you are doing straight cuts you should not loose any
quality when going back to DV again. If you did color correction,
titles, wipes etc. the parts that have those things need to be
rendered and thus an extra generation "loss" will occur. Usually
this isn't visible though and not really an issue.

Aviv,

Why don't you preview your tapes on your tv through your camera. Log the timecode (in and out) for each clip you wish to use and then batch capture them into your computer? thats if you have no broken timecode.

It will save a lot of space on your HD and you can edit your video all on one timeline.

You do not mention what NLE app you are using, but most NLEs will enable you to do this.

It just means a bit of preperation before you start editing.

Cheers,

Ed