efficient DVD transfer procedures using imovie/idvd

[Nicholas Foster]

One of the services I'm often asked to provide by my customers are basic home video to DVD transfers. I'm trying to find the most efficient procedure for providing this service, as I'm getting more and more requests. Keep in mind that these customers are just households and families who have no need for high end or specific technical quality.

My current setup involves capturing the customer's analog videotapes using iMovie and an analog to firewire convertor. Once captured, I drop the .dv file into iDVD and tailor the theme/burn the disc. Works okay and pretty streamlined.

The problem I'm having is that I typically have some waste footage to cut from the captured clips (usually 3-5 seconds of blue in the beginning and sometimes large sections of blue at the end). I can easily trim this off in iMovie, but I cannot send the project file to iDVD without waiting the lengthly encoding time, usually an hour or more. Not efficient at all.

I can send the raw captured .dv file to iDVD quickly with no encoding time, but there doesn't seem to be a way to preform simple trims in iDVD.

Does anyone have any input on the MOST EFFICIENT way of preforming this procedure? I sometimes have to do several of these in a day so speed is priority one.

Easily capture analog videotapes digitally->trim off excess video->apply iDVD themes->burn

Thanks ahead of time,
Nick