[mdawson]

My research group wants to get our experiment footage onto DVD and I wanted to know the best way to do this with iMovie and iDVD. As far as getting the footage into iMovie, no problem, but now I need to get the raw footage onto DVD in a format that can be read by other video editing software (e.g., Final Cut, Adobe Premier, etc.). The purpose is to have the raw footage on DVD so that members of the group can use the raw footage to create clips in whatever video editing software they have after I leave the group.
So I ask,

What is the best format to save a project from iMovie into that can fit 60 minutes of video onto a 4.7 GB DVD-R with reasonable (minimal) compression?
Is it possible to save said video files to DVD-R using iMovie/iDVD?
Is it possible to save an editable file from iMovie and simply burn it to DVD-R using a burn folder?
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[MacKayaker]

You want your cake and to eat it, too. That really isn't possible.
You can't store 60 minute of "raw footage" on a single DVD using the currently common media and formats. If you are willing to sacrifice quality and know it's not intended as an editable storage format, then there are lots of options for compressing the footage to get it to fit on a data DVD, either single or dual layer, but none of them are intended for editing - all of these options are intended for final output and viewing. But, depending on the format you choose, most professional editing apps will import and allow you to edit and output from those formats, all the while sacrificing quality, both in detail and color.
I would suggest your best option is to output the footage from iMovie in the dv format, as this is a highly compressed format, but still intended for editing. 60 minutes of dv footage requires around 12 or 13 GB of space.
Most video output formats compress the video by permanently throwing away pixels that aren't needed for playback, when properly viewed with the correct player. Video editing requires full frame data, so to edit that kind of video means adding all the taken away pixels back and that typically degrades the content, so depending on the level of compression and the quality of replacement, it can be tolerable to terrible, depending on your standards. As cheap as hard drives are, you would be better served storing the footage on hard drives, or be willing to have the 15-20 minutes of dv on single layer data DVDs or double that with dual layer DVDs. And even dv is not "raw" technically speaking - it uses about a tenth of the space that uncompressed video requires - and that's at standard resolutions.
One other potential gotcha. Even the though the dv format is a universal format, most editing programs work best when they have done the capture of the video they are going to edit. This is especially true the longer in length the clips are. I've read of people having issues when they attempt to capture with iMovie, then edit with Final Cut Pro. A professional editing application captures differently than a consumer app and that difference has lead to some issues for people.
Not intending to rain on your parade, but video can be tricky stuff and most of the messes people get into are because they don't perceive the complexity of what is going on. Many think in terms of analog formats they are familiar with and little that is true of analog formats applies to digital formats.
P.S. So without the above, the direct answer to your questions is: There isn't one. No. No, for 60 minutes, but yes outputing 15-20 minutes of dv from iMovie.

[mdawson]

Thanks MacKayaker. Digital video editing is not my fort. Storing 15 to 20 minutes of DV content to a DVD can work as experimental trials for our work is never longer than 15 minutes. One replication per DVD is better than nothing. The final destination for much of the content will be small video clips in PowerPoint presentations, so a minor loss in quality is not a big deal. The ultimate problem is that most of the members of the research team cannot justify the expense of professional level video editing software. Unlike on the Mac where iMovie is readily available, free and good enough for capturing, editing and exporting to a final video, the group is in agreement that the consumer-grade video editors for Windows, which are not free, are not worth what they cost.

[MacKayaker]

If you use DV, then you will have virtually no lose from the original capture and that is the beauty of it. It is easily transferred and edited and if the original capture was really good - it will be as a dv file - of course, the flip side is true, also.
iMovie was designed and intended only for DV capture, though it has gained a bit more HDdv flexibility, but nothing like that of a professional editing app, which is designed to work with a wide range of formats, each with their own frame rates and resolutions. I think you will find this the simplest way to go, though a lot will depend on what people on the Windows side of things use. But dv is not a platform specific format and is designed to handle the kind of thing you are talking about.

[mdawson]

It seems that iMovie stores its clips as DV files in the project package, so there is no real need for me to do an export. I am considering saving related groups of the clip (DV) files onto DVD for other group members to have. Does this sound like a feasible plan of action?