Ok working part time at a local church...

Seems the majority of the editing is on DVD, now I have the daunting task
of ripping about 200+ dvds back to the powermac and into finalcut for edits.

Should I just use Handbrake to rip and encode?

There are also 2 Dell systems with 3gigs of ram in each.

Should I use dvdshrink on one while I edit on the powermac?

Does anyone have an alternative?

From a lay-persons perspective....

If super high, "close to original quality" isn't a big concern...you could just play the DVD's and recapture it via firewire using an analog to DV converter[or via camcorder's pass thru connection]. You can then edit right away.

Obviously a quality hit right? But would take less time as the capture will be in real time.

Otherwise, the free MPEG Streamclip software works pretty good--you just grab only the sections you want from each dvd.