HD video from HV-30, editing and burning to DVD

Hi, I'll start by saying I've got no prior experience with video editing. I shot some videos in HD and loaded them one at a time onto my Mac (MacBook Pro) through iMovie but now I have the issue of getting them onto DVD.

The files are about 24-30GB each so there is no way I can get them to DVD without compressing them. I converted 2 movies into QuickTime clips by using File>Export>Quicktime>CD-ROM compression size. They both play but to me appear to be way too tiny for viewing on TV. Would it be a better idea to export them to iDVD and then burn to disk or will the QuickTime file be descent enough from viewing on tv?

Now comes the one of the other problems, each time I try loading the original file onto a portable hard drive (250GB capacity) I get an "error 1309". Why won't it let me transfer the file?

Problem #2 is that I want to store one of the movies on a DVD or my portable hard drive in it's original condition so that somebody I know from work can edit the video down to put on the store's website. Supposedly, if I export into iDVD and then burn he will be unable to edit the video. So how can I store the original in a way that it can be transported (i.e. DVD or portable hard drive) and then edited if I can't get the original on the hard drive to begin with?

Again, I have no experience with any of this so any help would be much appreciated.

You need to format your external drive to either HFS+ or NTFS since it most likely is in FAT32 which limits file sizes to 4GB.

Is your buddy working with a MAC as well? If not, then I would suggest using NTFS format for the external.

Video needs to be compressed into a DVD Compliant MPEG-2 format before being burned onto a Video DVD.
you can re-edit video from the DVD, but it's not recommended.

Thanks for the help. I downoaded NTFS-3G and MacFUSE and clicked install. I thought everything was working fine but once again I got an Error 1309 message after 19GB of the video was loaded onto the external drive. I guess that means the original file is corrupted but I don't know what could have caused it and I don't feel like having to reload the 30GB of video from the tape. So how can I get rid of the error message?

For the movies, I might try something like DVDshrink but I won't hold my breath

Alright, I dumped the video that I want to be able to edit. I loaded one of the other videos (15GB) I have and transfered it to the external drive without any problems or error messages. I just finished re-loading the video I want edited and am currently loading it to the external drive. Hopefully it will also load without any problems.


Edit:
Well, it didn't work. I checked the external drive and it still reads as FAT32 and the download to the external drive stopped with 9 minutes left to go

Strange that it copied the 15gig file over while it is still FAT32 formatted.
I don't use a Mac so I am not sure how you go about formatting a drive on it.
If you have a PC or a friend that has a PC, format the drive in NTFS on their machine.

I could try it on my dad's PC. With the one movie that keeps getting the error, I think I've narrowed it down to a specific clip that might be the problem. I just tried loading the clip alone and it wouldn't work. Now I'm going to try loading some of the other clips.

If I still can't manage to get it working I'll go to the folks that fixed my superdrive and ask them. They are an Apple authorized repair place so they should be able to figure it out.

Thanks for your help anyway I appreciate it.

EDITI trashed the problem clip that I found and was able to load the video (25GB) to the external drive without another problem.