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Do you organize your video with iPhoto or iMovie?

K

kepardue

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 28, 2006
354
7
I've got all of my home movies sitting in iMovie's library, but it seems like Apple is increasingly pushing iPhoto to be the main movie organization tool. It's actually difficult to import only the photos from the iPhone into iPhoto, and, now that iPhoto supports AVCHD, from my big still/video camera too.

Is it better to just have one's movies in iPhoto and just pull them out from the iPhoto Videos when you want to make a movie? How do you organize your home movies?

My iPhoto library is already HUGE with just photos in it. I have 25,461 photos covering 110GB of space.
 
I almost never take movies with my still camera, as I have a miniDV camcorder for movies. Thus, I keep pretty much all my home movies in iMovie. I happily use iPhoto '08 for my photos.

But, I've wondered the same thing, and would be interested in others' responses... Is iPhoto good at organizing lots of movies?
 
I just avoid iPhoto all together.
Click to expand...
Doesn't mean that we all have to.

iMovie is not really meant as a video organiser. It's an App for editing. When you import into iMovie it converts your video footage into the Apple Intermediate Codec format creating files that are HUGE in comparison to, say, AVCHD, so you are very quickly going to fill up a hard drive. Even more so if you're filming in HD.

My stills camera takes pretty good video, so I use that quite often for adhoc stuff. It gets imported into iPhoto and I keep all my video in a separate Album, so I know where it is. I then import into iMovie via the iMovie iPhoto Video browser.
 
I use iPhoto to organise my pics and haven't got around to using iMovie or organising my videos yet.

I have a TZ20 and use that as my still and video, which takes AVCHD video. Can I ask how iPhoto imports the AVCHD video? How it handles it/organising it etc please?

And also as op said can you then just import to iMovie eventually to edit, then how does it get organised/imported back into iPhoto?

Cheers
 
Dave Braine said:
Doesn't mean that we all have to.

iMovie is not really meant as a video organiser. It's an App for editing. When you import into iMovie it converts your video footage into the Apple Intermediate Codec format creating files that are HUGE in comparison to, say, AVCHD, so you are very quickly going to fill up a hard drive. Even more so if you're filming in HD.

My stills camera takes pretty good video, so I use that quite often for adhoc stuff. It gets imported into iPhoto and I keep all my video in a separate Album, so I know where it is. I then import into iMovie via the iMovie iPhoto Video browser.
Click to expand...

I hadn't thought of that. That would be a huge file size savings in terms of keeping the videos easily watchable/accessible but at a reasonable file size for those that I *don't* want to turn into edited movies.

My still camera also takes good video, I've been increasingly replacing my camcorder with it. Nice having one bulky piece of electronics with me instead of two.

Most of my video isn't actually in an edited project... I wonder if there's a way to convert older video into AVCHD in a fairly lossless way?

----------
MrMister111 said:
I use iPhoto to organise my pics and haven't got around to using iMovie or organising my videos yet.

I have a TZ20 and use that as my still and video, which takes AVCHD video. Can I ask how iPhoto imports the AVCHD video? How it handles it/organising it etc please?

And also as op said can you then just import to iMovie eventually to edit, then how does it get organised/imported back into iPhoto?

Cheers
Click to expand...

Until one of the more recent iPhoto point updates, it didn't import AVCHD at all. That's what made it easy to keep my movies in iMovie and pictures in iPhoto--iPhoto would simply ignore the movies on the camera card.

iPhoto makes little distinction between photos and video, except that you can perform basic playback. I'm not sure how you can export it out of iMovie back to iPhoto, haven't tried that.
 
Also forgot to ask, where do you store your iPhoto library then? As if it has AVCHD then the library file size must be massive?

cheers
 
Very interesting discussion here. I'm also wondering the same thing now that iPhoto also handles HD video...
 
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