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d82k

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 24, 2011
48
0
Dear all,

After importing almost 500GB DV video on my iMac with iMovie my mac became slow especially iMovie. I thought it was a RAM issue so I increased it.. nothing changed.

Now considering DV video files and in future I will also have a lot of 1080p50 files, which is the best solution to store files?
I have tried saving them on my NAS, with a 1gb lan connection but no changes.. Is this because of the has speed cause the connection line should be comparable to firewire 800?

What do you suggest to do? Is an USB external SATA hdd enough, or should I go for a firewire or any thing else?

Thank you for your comments,
dk
 
Nov 28, 2010
22,670
30
located
USB 2.0 is too slow for 1080p footage, for DV footage it is okay. FW 800 is your best bet.
Btw, what do you mean with "slow"? What is slow? The Mac or iMovie or?
And do you have all your DV media in one folder and one iMovie project?

I work with Avid Media Composer, a professional editing application, thus not suited for your needs I guess. But with that application we edited TV series with 6 to 12 TB of DV and other SD (Standard Definition) footage on Macs from 2004 to 2006.
HD footage does take up more storage space, but as iMovie transcodes the footage to a proper editing format and codec during import, CPU usage should be not that high. I recently edited 1080p footage on my 2007 iMac and 2009 MBP, though it was only 200 GB of data, but even with 2 TB of data or more, I wouldn't experience any more slowdowns. I just stored the footage on an external FW 800 HDD or the extra internal HDD in my MBP, which runs its OS from an SSD.

Have you also taken a look at Activity Monitor (select to SHOW ALL PROCESSES) while using iMovie?
 

d82k

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 24, 2011
48
0
Thank you for your really fast answer simsaladimbamba!

Actually, yes all the imported movie are in the iMovie Events folder, each movie separate in its subfolder.

By slow I mean mac os, and definitely iMovie, I think just because there are so many events. I try to move files to the external hdd and keep on the local only the ones i need now.
The activity monitor shows that starting the iMovie cpu % goes up to 100 (and also above, cannot understand how is it possible), it takes about a minute to open it. And just passing with the mouse pointer over the project movie to see preview cpu % goes up to 40. Memory used by iMovie is about 400mb. All other processes are ok. Global ram usage is ok, using almost 4gb on 12.

I also downloaded the trial version of final cut pro, today i try to create a new project and see how does it go.. if i'm not wrong, for the future iMovie does not support 1080p if not converting those files.

Thank you for your advices
have a nice day
dk
 

arjen92

macrumors 65816
Sep 9, 2008
1,066
0
Below sea level
In my experience the old iMovie always got unstable with long and big projects (with long, I mean 10 minutes).

So perhaps this is still the case.
 

d82k

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 24, 2011
48
0
As far as i was able to understand reading on some websites, iMovie does not support 1080p unless you allow it to convert to the iMovie format.

By the way it is not possible to import iMovie project PAL into Final Cut Pro X 10.0.1 because it crashes! Thank god I have the trial version and did not buy it!
 

cgbier

macrumors 6502a
Jun 6, 2011
933
2
As far as i was able to understand reading on some websites, iMovie does not support 1080p unless you allow it to convert to the iMovie format.

By the way it is not possible to import iMovie project PAL into Final Cut Pro X 10.0.1 because it crashes! Thank god I have the trial version and did not buy it!
iMovie11 supports 1080p24/25/30 perfectly well. There's no "iMovie format". Everything that is ingested into iMovie is transcoded to AIC which is 100% compatible with FCP X.
However, your project file doesn't contain any footage. It is simply a database telling iMovie or FCP where to find the media and what you've done to them so far. FCP crashing shouldn't have anything to do with the import.

What are your project's settings btw?

On a supported system with enough CPU/GPU power and RAM, FCP X runs pretty solid. I had only one project so far that made FCP X crash. That had some funky clips in there, though, that FCP didn't seem to like much.
I found out that on my 2010 MBP, it is better to work with the Intel GPU than using the nVidia. There's a nifty little app that lets you switch manually.
 
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