Running out of Space and Time

First of all I'd like to say a huge thank you to everyone on these forums whose advice and expertise have been invaluable to me over the last 6 months. I started out as a complete novice with very little video knowledge and have now landed a job on a liveaboard in Thailand visiting the Similan/Surin Islands and Richelieu Rock, but from this stems a problem...

My workflow is like this 4 days 4 nights of diving filming up to 4 dives a day, most trips I film 12 dives in HDV format. My average day goes like this:

up at 6.30 am dive-film-capture-edit-dive-film-capture-edit-dive-film-capture-edit-dive-film-capture-edit and render to mpeg2 and ac3 for dvd over night - sleep at 11 - this x 3 and you have one trip. On the final day I create the DVD with DVD Studio Pro and Burn and Deliver it to my customers. I just got this workflow nailed and all is going well.

The thing is I am collecting A LOT of footage ~60 Gig a trip and want to start a library of the best stuff and I don't have a hell of a lot of time to do this with the 4 days on 1 day off schedule of the next six months... All I want to do on my day on land is sleep...

Other than huge hard drives how do you guys manage your archives. I would like to archive individual shots, but also have a library of best footage from each dive site to pad out any videos from trips where I struggle to get anything worth filming for whatever reason. Also a library for possible commercial use.

Basically any advice you guys might have about streamlining workflow and time saving would be very welcome.

Thanks,

Tom

PS I use a Macbook 2.0 ghz Core Duo 2gig Ram 70gig Hard drive

3 external Hard drives totaling ~800 gig (only the internal drive and 1 usb powered 160gig drive are of any use on the boat due to dodgy power supplies)

FCP Studio 2 to edit and export using Compresser to DVD format...

Keeping up with that lot sounds a nightmare.

With respect to on board archive storage, even the smallest, cheapest UPS, that you can leave on board, will stabilise and run a good size 3.5" USB caddy drive.

I used to make a best shots folder when i worked the liveaboards, and back it up to tape once a week. I also saved a high quality version of the video too. Can you burn archived files to DVD?

A $50 UPS shoudl do teh trick though, and buy lots of storage and sort it out later... keep piling it on your HDD's and spend a week deleting your worst stuff at the end of the season.

Iview media is a good option for organising clips, but isnt supported on mac as much as it used to be, not sure what mac options there are.

I do the same job on Similan and Burma trips and I've always been religious about archiving my best clips from each trip. I just go through the finished project and render the best clips to my archive hard drive, usually without audio. After a few years of this I'm now up to 16,000 clips covering 800 species from 150 sites. I've never kept tapes but I do keep 3 copies of my entire archive. But it does take me a good half day usually to archive at the end of each liveaboard. If you're doing all the trips with not much break then just archive what you can in the time available, or keep the tapes and wait until you get a decent break to do it then.