the reason the file is so large now (although 1.5 gigs seems a bit excessive for three minutes; what codecs are you using?) is because you're performing all these operations on it. Once you get the whole movie edited and graded and all that goodness, you'll want to flatten the timeline into a single video file and compress it down to an MPEG-2 file that you can then author to a DVD. This compression will bring the file size in at just over about two gigabytes for a 45-minute project. As long as you've got enough hard drive space to hold the uncompressed project files in the meantime, you're good.

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Andrew Gingerich
Exploding Goldfish Films
Check out my vodcast on iTunes: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=96931870
and my blog at http://www.exgfilms.com

thanks, i've been keeping in dv avi format. But i'll try mpeg-2

You should edit in AVI format and only convert to MPEG2 when you're ready to burn a DVD. You don't want to edit with MPEG video because it's lossy, meaning that it loses quality every time you manipulate it. AVI does not have this disadvantage.

-----------------
Andrew Gingerich
Exploding Goldfish Films
Check out my vodcast on iTunes: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=96931870
and my blog at http://www.exgfilms.com

thanks, is there a particular program that is good at converting the mpeg-2? What about mpeg-4?