iMovie 08 Hard drive Question

[martinmartin]

If I have all of my video on an external hard drive, is there a way to 'point' iMovie 08 to that drive so that I can create projects and edit and save without the footage (aside from the final project footage) being saved on my internal drive.

For example, I had a very long video on my internal drive. I created a 2 minute project and then moved the long video from my internal drive to my external. But the project wasn't accessible after this.

I would like to store all of my video on the external drive, connect it when I want to create projects and edit, and save the projects on my internal drive. Is this possible? If so, how?

Thanks.

 

[gauchogolfer]

I believe that you should be able to keep all of your imported video files on the external, which is what I do with iMovie HD. I do all of the editing on the file located on the external. When you want to export them, to h.264 or mp4 for example, you can choose to do so on the internal drive.

 

[martinmartin]

Thanks for the response, but I'm not sure how to do this in iMovie 08.

How do I view and edit the movies on my external without importing them to my internal drive? Thanks.

 

[gauchogolfer]

Thanks for the response, but I'm not sure how to do this in iMovie 08.

How do I view and edit the movies on my external without importing them to my internal drive? Thanks.

I don't have iMovie 08 installed, but in iMovie HD, you effectively store the 'project' on the external drive, and all of the editing is done there. It's all stored in one location. As to how that would be any different in iMovie 08, I don't know.

When you imported the video from your camcorder, how did you do it?

 

[martinmartin]

I don't have iMovie 08 installed, but in iMovie HD, you effectively store the 'project' on the external drive, and all of the editing is done there. It's all stored in one location. As to how that would be any different in iMovie 08, I don't know.

When you imported the video from your camcorder, how did you do it?

I imported right into iMovie 08, but i didnt realize how much space it would take up. So then I decided I would just store all my movies on an external drive, but when I move them, they are [obviously] out of my imovie08 library and any projects including video that has been moved just has a yellow icon with an exclamation point inside (and wont play). I was hoping there would be a way to 'save' the projects so that i could at least keep them on my internal drive without the rest of the video I dont need. I know i can always export the projects, but I'd like to keep them in an easily editable form...

The only option I see is to import the video again, defeating the purpose of the external hard drive.

Thanks.

 

[gauchogolfer]

If you've copied the projects from the internal to the external, can you go to the external in the finder and open the project directly from there?

Also, maybe there is something like 'rebuild thumbnails for iPhoto' for iMovie.

Thirdly, can you have multiple libraries in iMovie, which would be accessed via holding down option as you start iMovie?

Fourthly, did you move the movies using Finder? You might try just resaving them from within iMovie, but saving on your external. This ought to help it stay organized.

Give those a try and let us know how it goes.

 

[SonicChronicler]

I have a similarly rooted problem.

I have a brand new Macbook Pro and a firewire powered external drive.

I created a project on the hard drive and found I couldn't add/import AVI or MOV files to the project. The files would all play on the Mac separately, but I got an unknown error when trying to import.

This happened in both iMovie 6HD & iMovie 08

I eventually cured the problem by re-creating the project on the laptop drive - but would have thought that, given the massive size of today's video files you would have been able to store it all externally.

I guess it's down to transfer speeds and stability, or maybe I'm just missing something?

Sonic

 

[andy.barron]

I don't know if this is of any help, but I have had the upgrade to '08 for 2 days now & all of my data is on my external 800 drive. I have only to date imported my old HD files (still doing) but simply told iMove to store the data externally. The project file & thumbnail files are within my users/imove folder but these are only 44kb. All the other data is external (55gb & rising!).

Any good?

 

[uaswimmer1995]

I just installed iMovie 08 on my iMac and have imported some HD video from my new Sony HD camcorder. That worked well, but I cannot figure out how to transfer those files to an external hard drive. My iMac's hard drive is going to fill quickly if I have to leave all these videos on the internal one. Can anyone help with how to transfer a completed HD file to an external drive? Thanks!

 

[Sandman66]

Answer

I know I am late responding and I am not sure if you have your answer yet, but here it goes.

iMovie stores data in two folders: iMovie Events and iMovie Projects. The iMovie events folder is larger of the two and contains the thumbnails and video.

You can move the files to an external hard drive, but you can't do it using Finder as you have realized. You need to do it from iMovie.

1. Open iMovie
2. Change the view in the Events window to View Events by Volume. You can do this by clicking the Volume icon to the right of Event Library or by right-clicking in the Event Library and selecting it.
3. Open the volume where your events are stored. Select it and drag it to the volume you want to store it in. This puts the event at the root of the volume in an iMovie Events folder. I have not tried to move it from the root. You also have to move each event one at a time instead of all on the same volume to the new volume.

This would store your events to the external drive. The iMovie Projects folder which is relatively small would remain on your internal hard drive at ~/<home>/Movies/iMovie Projects

 

[djejrejk]

Late reply I know, but this totally works. Thanks!

 

[photogcairo]

When I try that procedure with a USB 2.0 drive it provides an error that reads "this volume is not compatible with imovie". Do you suppose that it has to be a firewire drive or am I doing something wrong? 400? 800?
-thanks

 

[filman408]

When importing/capturing footage, you should be able to tell it which hard drive to "Save to".

 

[agape48]

Hi photocairo:
I was getting the same error about the drive not being compatible. It was because my drive was formatted as FAT32 instead of whatever the Mac file system is. Once I reformatted the drive, it worked.

 

[photogcairo]

THANKS
I hadn't thought of the format thing but it worked fine after that!
As far as the importing menu.. thanks for the thought but unfortunately when the hard drive wasn't formatted correctly the only drive in the "save to" drop menu was the internal drive in my macbook pro.

I used disk utility to format my external drive to "mac OS extended (journaled)"

thanks again