begginners imovie question

[dannnyh]

I've downloaded 90min of footage from my video camera into imovie and the file size is 21gb! Can that be right??? I've transfered it into idvd to burn on to disk but it says the project is to big.

Have I missed a stage somewhere that shrinks the file down in size?

 

[yellow]

Which version of iMovie and iDVD are we talking about?


1 movie file is 21GB? I don't think that's right.. I thought iMovie had a 2GB chunk limit. Maybe all of them add up to 21GB?

It doesn't shrink, becuase it's Digital Video, it's nearly unencrypted. Once it's put on the DVD, it's compressed a little, but not too much.

You might get some milage out of these links:

http://www.apple.com/support/mac101/work/13/
http://www.apple.com/support/mac101/work/12/

Your project size is still limited by tyhe size of your DVD, typically 4.5ishGB, so if you're exceeding that, it won't fit ont he DVD and you need to chop it down in iMovie. Also, menus and whatnot all ccontribute to the overall size of the project, stealing from the amount of footage time.

 

[Applespider]

That's about right. 13GB per hour of DV footage plus a little for iMovie's overheads.

iMovie HD saves everything as a single project file (you can go in and see the bundles if you really want to) which is what is likely the 21GB.

If your finished project is 90 minutes, then you're going to have to use the lower quality level in iDVD (it will be burn 60 minutes at high quality and 120 minutes at slightly lower (more compressed) quality).

If you've also added raw files, pictures or movies, you need to make sure that it's not all coming in at over the DVD's capacity.

Only other problem I can think of that might cause an error is if you don't have enough free HD space on your Mac to create the DVD before the system burns it. You probably need to have a minimum of about 10-15GB free