General Workflow Question

[Blazer5913]

Hey Guys,
Quick question for you regarding general workflows. I am fairly new to video capturing/editing/storing but very familiar with computers and storage/backups. I recently got a DJI Mavic Air drone that I've been LOVING and have some incredible 4k footage from. However, my problem is that my videos are massive in size. I understand that I could decrease the size by dropping the resolution; however, I want to keep 4k. Same concept for videos from my iPhone X that are 4k. Large in size but incredible quality - so I want to keep them that way.

For reference, I have a 27" iMac 2017, 3.5ghz i5, 24gb RAM, and 512gb SSB. I also have 4TB and 8TB External HDDs hooked up to the iMac, both USB 3.0. They are currently being used for media storage (Movies/TV shows) as well as Time Machine as well as Carbon Copy Cloner backups. I have several free TBs free though and can get another HDD if needed. I work mostly in iMovie and Photos (nothing more advanced at least right now).

That being said, what are your general "workflows" in terms of where you initially drop footage from drone (or camera, iPhone, etc) onto your computer. My issue is that I started a few projects in iMovie on my iMac, importing the footage directly into iMovie on my iMac SSD. Yet, after a few weeks of creating various projects, I was already down hundreds of gigs of space. Obviously this is not a viable long term solution. So is there a "standard workflow" for this type of scenario. My thinking is that I should keep the footage I'm currently working with on the SSD locally (since makes the real-time edits faster?) and "the rest" externally. But then what about once you're done with a project? Export a standard .mp4 or whatever codec you want so that you have a single file to show friends/family or upload to YouTube, etc. But then what about the project itself? It's still a huge iMovie file but probably a good idea to keep "raw" in case you need to go back to edit something in the future? Do you keep this on external HDDs? Just in "iMovie format" if that even exists?

Sorry for the rambling - hopefully you get my drift. I tried googling as well as searching the forums here, but nothing really gave me an answer. However, it seems like this should be a fairly uncommon problem that there have to be some workflow videos/documents that outline this right? Anyways, feel free to share anything you think would be helpful to me! New at this video stuff but really enjoying it!

 

[velocityg4]

After looking at a couple articles.

Setup another drive as your archive drive. Go to File > Open Library > New. Select the location for your new library and name it.

Select your original library in the "iMovie Library Dropdown" under the Media, Projects and Theater tabs.

Find the project you want to move. Click the three dots (...) next to the project title. Choose "Move to Library" and select your archive library to move it to.

When you want to work on it again. You can switch to the archive library and work on it there from the slower drive or move it back to your SSD.

 

[ColdCase]

GoPro and drone footage can suck up lots of drive space and editing 4K with any kind of effects is demanding on drive speed.

Generally I work on current projects and video from a library on the internal drive. When the library gets big enough, I drag and drop it (from the finder) to an external SSD Thunderbolt drive. And when those libraries get old enough that I don't frequent the footage, I drag and drop the library to massive external hard drives for archiving as I hate to throw anything away. All these have backups of course. I have a couple different working libraries on the internal drive, maybe 500GB each.

I found large libraries can be slow to open and sometimes navigate.

After suffering with only 1TB internal flash for awhile, my new machine has 2TB of internal storage, 6TB of external SSD and maybe 20 TB of rotational hard drive storage available. My libraries are generally about 6-12 months of media. The GoPro media libraries are separate from the home video library and are generally organized by month or event.

Alternatively, you can store your media in fast external drives and link to them instead of importing them. SSDs will work much better.

Then you need to think carefully about indexing and file naming so you can find a video source quickly. FCPX's media tagging feature is great at this.

So the best workflow for you depends a bit on what kind of editing hardware you have and how you want to organize your archives.