Archive iMovie Video

[ucflyboy]

I've imported over 300 gb of video, edited in iMovie '08 and burned a few DVD's. Now to free up room for new projects I'd like to archive my video in a format I can edit in iMovie later on. Raw video imports at 13 gb/hr are out of the question since I have boatloads of video to archive. Is there a format to which I can save my video and burn to a dvd or send to a hard drive for later use? Thanks.

Larry

 

[killmoms]

Not really. There's a reason it's large—it's already in a format designed for "archival," which is to say "the quality it came off the camera at." Anything that will save a significant amount of room is also going to greatly reduce the quality (and prevent you from editing with it later, at least in any easy fashion).

Just bite the bullet, buy a big external hard drive (they're cheap), and start moving files.

 

[LethalWolfe]

Archiving your footage on DV tape is your best bet.


Lethal

 

[MacForMeOneDay]

Archiving your footage on DV tape is your best bet.


Lethal

But just using iMovie there isn't a good way to do this (unless I'm missing something).

Also has anyone ever tried bzip2 on the dv files and tarring them up? Is there any reason this wouldn't work? (The tar files could be stored on any digital media)

 

[harcosparky]

Archiving your footage on DV tape is your best bet.


Lethal

Well I guess if archiving on DV tape is best, shooting on DV tape would also be best.

By the way, that's how we have done it to this point. Shoot on DV tape, edit in the computer, record the final product back to a DV tape. This way we have the original footage on the tape it was shot on and also a copy of the final product.

I've been going crazy trying to buy a new camcorder, looking at all the new technologies and have come to the conclusion that my new camcorder will be a tape based HDV unit.

 

[killmoms]

But just using iMovie there isn't a good way to do this (unless I'm missing something).

Also has anyone ever tried bzip2 on the dv files and tarring them up? Is there any reason this wouldn't work? (The tar files could be stored on any digital media)

It's mostly that attempting to compress the files any further wouldn't make much difference. DV files are already compressed with the DV codec, it's why they're so much smaller than uncompressed video, and I doubt a lossless data compression scheme would make much difference (like trying to ZIP JPGs or MP3s). You could certainly TAR them I suppose, but if you're not compressing them, why bother?

 

[LethalWolfe]

But just using iMovie there isn't a good way to do this (unless I'm missing something).

Just use iMovie to record the video onto tape. Easy as pie.


Lethal