Help with iMovie

dsherry said:

hi

I am new to mac and I need some help with iMovie. I have a canon hf200 camcorder and i have around 14GB video on my SDHC card. I imported the videos to iMovie and now the available space on my mac went from around 480Gb to 280 GB. I don't understand this. Does copying the AVCHD files into iMovie take a lot of space? if so what is the best way to reduce the space?

Thanks in advance for help

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Upon import the AVCHD footage gets converted to QuickTime files (.mov) using the Apple Intermediate Codec to ensure proper editing, thus you will have bigger files (up to 40GB/h). There is no way around this in iMovie, as it can't edit AVCHD files natively like Premiere or Avid Media Composer, as doing that is quite CPU intensive, due to the MPEG-4 codec used for AVCHD.

You can use Disk Inventory X (linked by stridemat), but most probably the movies are located inside Macintosh HD/Users/yourusername/Movies/iMovie.