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Help! My iMovie has created a monster!!

D

DaveinJapan

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 9, 2005
77
0
Japan
A monster file, that is. 24.8 GB, to be exact.

I hooked up my videocamera via firewire and imported some home movies. Probably a little over an hour of footage, raw...and I ended up with this enormous file. I was looking over the clips with friends (some of the 8-10 minute clips are 2 gig!), and they all said it's just way too big.

Is this a problem with my settings, or am I missing something? I also have another iMovie project with nothing but slideshow clips that also seems way too big. I'm literally watching my hard drive disappear before my eyes! After this, with only 5 or so gig left on my hard drive, I was kinda wishing I'd payed the extra cash for the 100GB hard drive lol. :p
 
Just a guess as I don't have iMovie HD, but is it at all possible that your standard DV input is getting converted to HDV of some sort or other by iMovie?

Because if that's possible, and I don't actually know if iMovie can do this, that might be an explanation of the file size. Standard DV consumes about 12GB per hour I believe, and I 'think' HDV can be much more or about the same depending on the particular codec and compressions and whether its 720p or 1080i. Figures like 30GB per hour or similar get mentioned for some variations of these.

But, I'm really just guessing here, you need a Video Editor Guru :)
 
DaveinJapan said:
A monster file, that is. 24.8 GB, to be exact.

I hooked up my videocamera via firewire and imported some home movies. Probably a little over an hour of footage, raw...and I ended up with this enormous file. I was looking over the clips with friends (some of the 8-10 minute clips are 2 gig!), and they all said it's just way too big.

Is this a problem with my settings, or am I missing something? I also have another iMovie project with nothing but slideshow clips that also seems way too big. I'm literally watching my hard drive disappear before my eyes! After this, with only 5 or so gig left on my hard drive, I was kinda wishing I'd payed the extra cash for the 100GB hard drive lol. :p
Click to expand...

I don't think this is too big. I edited about 15 minutes of footage down to 8, and the whole iMovie file (including the transitions but excluding the 7 minutes I deleted) comes to 4GB. On my iBook, I had to use my iPod as an external hard drive to keep it going.
 
Make sure that when you opened iMovie HD and made a new project, that it was set to DV not HD or anything else.
 
How do I check my settings? I looked in preferences but didn't see anything there that seemed to apply (except for maybe "new project frame rate"? But that seems to be only 29.97 fps or 25, would that make a difference?)... :confused:
 
No, 29.97 and 25 are frame rates, 29.97 being NTSC and 25 being PAL, that would make no difference, I just checked iMovie myself and also couldn't find any settings for DV or HD, I think iMovie discovers this itself.
But I personally do not think that the file sizes are too big, and seem right for DV video with stereo.
 
you actually can choose what camera you have (HDV, DV Widescreen, DV Standard) Right from the dropdown when you create a new project. If you selected high def and put in regular, you can expect about a day of rendering for it to pillarbox it (the worst feature ever).
 
So what can be done to downsize it?(other then editing)
So if I got a 25gig sized file downloaded from a DV, how can we convert/downsize to burn it into a 1hr DVD?

I presently just about finishing a DV download and when I see the present size of the file.... I just wonder how the heck would I burn that on a DVD. Any advise?
 
Once you've edited it and made it look how you want it to in iMovie, click on the little tab in iMovie which says iDVD, once you have set up your DVD in iDVD click burn and iDVD will do all the compression for you, so no need to worry.
 
Hi! As opposed to earlier versions of iMovie, version 5 keeps the original, unedited file on disk. All the editing, filters, etc etc are then added to the file size. Therefore everything done to the iMovie project is undoable. And the project file/folder can be enormous! Thus, the file size will not be reduced by editing (it will actually grow). Good: All your original footage is always intact. Bad: Your drive is eaten away fast!

As long as you have the harddrive space, this does not really matter and is mainly a good thing.

And the final movie will, as usual, fit on a DVD since the original DV footage will be compressed into DVD (mpeg2) format when starting iDVD or DVD Studio Pro. This encoding takes some time even on fast G5s. Keep the iMovie project under one hour for fastest results. A DVD can hold 2 hours but it will require significantly more heavy lifting from the CPU during compression. Again - it is the length that decides wheter a movie will fit on a dvd or not - not the intermediate DV and iMovie project files.

Other people can surely give a more accurate and professional description (and it has been posted if not here perhaps at MacFixit.com - do a search). There are tutorials out on the web if doing a google search. Now it is late here - good night and good luck!

And by the way - your 2GB files are perfectly normal. iMovie cannot handle files larger than 2 GB - all continuous scenes longer than roughly 9 minutes will be automatically divided into 2 GB files upon import. These will join perfectly when added after each other on the timeline in iMovie. Nema problema.
 
gangst said:
Once you've edited it and made it look how you want it to in iMovie, click on the little tab in iMovie which says iDVD, once you have set up your DVD in iDVD click burn and iDVD will do all the compression for you, so no need to worry.
Click to expand...

Thank you :)
 
Interesting.

I see. Thanks very much for all the input!

Guess I'll have to go invest in that external hard drive tomorrow. :p

Any suggestions? I was going to go with Lacie, but a friend has a 250GB Western Digital he says works great with his PowerBook. Thoughts?
 
You never know if a LaCie has a Western Digital inside... Or Hitachi or whatever! LaCie does not manufacture their own harddrives, just the enclosures. But they do it good! I have a LaCie d2 Extreme 250 GB with FireWire 400 and 800 - FW800 is a good investment in the long run since it is wicked fast as soon as you bump into a G5 or other computer with a FW800 port. LaCieäs new triple-port drives are good (USB2/FW400/FW800) but remember to use FireWire as often as you can /the sustained read/write is faster than USB2 even if the specs seem to say that USB2 is faster.

Also check out OWCwho claims to have even faster FW800 drives than LaCie.
 
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