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iMovie- disappears when I click anywhere... HELP!

D

diehldun

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 15, 2003
674
0
OMG I just spend about 4 hours importing some video from my video camera to my PowerBook. What I thought would have been half an hour took the entire afternoon.

apparently, whenever i clicked "import" in iMovie, it selects only about 6 sec worth of shot, then I have to manually click "import" again. this times about 500 times... :mad:

anyways, I just finished importing TAPE ONE of TWO! I am trying to edit some scenes in iMovie, but after I run iMovie (froze before), and about 10 minutes later (the rainbow ball appears...), if I click anywhere in the iMovie window, iMovie completely shuts down! It disappears!

This is quite odd, and to top it off, I had no idea iMovie would suck that much memory out of my PowerBook.

Under my HD icon, it says 74.52 GB, 56.18 GB free. That's amazing! Before I imported it in iMovie, I had about 63 GB free. What happened to all of that? Any of it to come back if I delete the file?

Let's just say iMovie is not as easy as I though a Mac application was going to be... :(

Can anyone give me some advice/help/solution? Thank you.
 
Something is just very very wrong. Let me start by telling you where your hard drive space is going--video files are freakin huge. That's where your hard drive space is going. 13GB an hour huge. So it looks like you imported about half an hour's worth of footage.

Now the strange part is why you have to keep clicking import every 6 seconds. That shouldn't happen. Do you have FileVault turned on? If you do, save your file ouside of your home folder or use another user account. You can't import DV with FileVault turned on.

If you don't have FileVault turned on, then what kind of camera do you have, how is it connected to the Mac, what version of iMovie, what version of OS X? Basically all the details. It's a pretty foolproof process.
 
Horrortaxi said:
Something is just very very wrong. Let me start by telling you where your hard drive space is going--video files are freakin huge. That's where your hard drive space is going. 13GB an hour huge. So it looks like you imported about half an hour's worth of footage.

Now the strange part is why you have to keep clicking import every 6 seconds. That shouldn't happen. Do you have FileVault turned on? If you do, save your file ouside of your home folder or use another user account. You can't import DV with FileVault turned on.

If you don't have FileVault turned on, then what kind of camera do you have, how is it connected to the Mac, what version of iMovie, what version of OS X? Basically all the details. It's a pretty foolproof process.
Click to expand...

Ohhhhhh... I DO have FileVault turned on.

So what should I do? Is it too late to do anything? I do have a second tape to do. Will turning off FileVault save some hard drive space?

Now, how do I reclaim my HD space? (supposing that I will eventually put it on DVD) Can I delete it permanently, so that the whole damn thing disappears, and I can get all of it back?

P.S. Righto! Approx. 1/2 hour worth on :D
 
If video takes up so much HD space, how do pros w/ G5 w/ 80-GB hardrives handle it? Maybe they don't use filevault (but does filevault have anything to do with hogging up memory?) :confused:
 
FileVault has nothing to do with how much space your movies take up on the hard drive. It'll be 13GB an hour no matter what.

The way FileVault is screwing this up is with it's "on the fly" encrypting. It can't encrypt as fast as the DV stream comes in. I'm surprised you even get 6 seconds of recording.

When you delete the movie you will get your space back. The pros, by the way, aren't using 80GB drives. I'm not a pro, but I've got a 120GB drive just for video. That's not storage either, it's all workspace. A good rule of thumb is to have the drive 4-5 times larger than your project.

What I would do now is either turn off FileVault (do you need the security or is it just on for the hell of it?) or import your movies to a folder outside of your home folder (for example in the top level "Macintosh HD" folder). I'd probably trash what's already imported. You've probably dropped some frames and won't be happy with the result. Even if it all captured it's in a million clips and that will tax iMovie's capabilities, so start over and get the same half hour in 3-4 more managable clips. Import your stuff, export it to iDVD and then trash your original files if you won't need them again.

Have you used iMovie before? I just want to warn you up front about something that bites a lot of people on the butt. When you make edits in iMovie you're altering your original source file. If you accidently trash a clip it's gone once you empty the trash. Usually you can restore clips if you haven't emptied iMovie's trash, but not always (for some reason). For most people this isn't an issue because their projects don't get very complex. For people who like to do 2 versions of a movie it makes life difficult. I don't mean to scare you--iMovie is good software--just be careful about what you trash.
 
Horrortaxi said:
FileVault has nothing to do with how much space your movies take up on the hard drive. It'll be 13GB an hour no matter what.

The way FileVault is screwing this up is with it's "on the fly" encrypting. It can't encrypt as fast as the DV stream comes in. I'm surprised you even get 6 seconds of recording.

When you delete the movie you will get your space back. The pros, by the way, aren't using 80GB drives. I'm not a pro, but I've got a 120GB drive just for video. That's not storage either, it's all workspace. A good rule of thumb is to have the drive 4-5 times larger than your project.

What I would do now is either turn off FileVault (do you need the security or is it just on for the hell of it?) or import your movies to a folder outside of your home folder (for example in the top level "Macintosh HD" folder). I'd probably trash what's already imported. You've probably dropped some frames and won't be happy with the result. Even if it all captured it's in a million clips and that will tax iMovie's capabilities, so start over and get the same half hour in 3-4 more managable clips. Import your stuff, export it to iDVD and then trash your original files if you won't need them again.

Have you used iMovie before? I just want to warn you up front about something that bites a lot of people on the butt. When you make edits in iMovie you're altering your original source file. If you accidently trash a clip it's gone once you empty the trash. Usually you can restore clips if you haven't emptied iMovie's trash, but not always (for some reason). For most people this isn't an issue because their projects don't get very complex. For people who like to do 2 versions of a movie it makes life difficult. I don't mean to scare you--iMovie is good software--just be careful about what you trash.
Click to expand...

So, what's the best way to get rid of the movie file to recclaim my disk space?

Also, I did take some scenes out- my video camera was attached via firewire. so does that mean footage from my camera was deleted too????? if so, OMG. I deleted them via iMovie, but it's still in the trash.
 
To get rid of the movie and reclaim your disk space you drag the iMovie project to the trash and empty it. Just like you would with any other file you wanted to delete.

iMovie won't do anything to your tape. You can rewind it, reimport it, put it in a closet, whatever. The only time iMovie will write to your tape is if you tell it to do so by clicking "print to tape". You can't do it by accident.
 
Right now I'm emptying the trash via secure empty... it's taking eternity! the window says I'm deleting 838 items! are they all the clips? ( i had another file, but I aborted that one early and started the latest one; all in the trash!)

so eventually, by doing this, I'll reclaim all the HD disk space, right? and then I'll start on a fresh slate soon :)
 
Yeah, secure empty takes a long time. Boy, you're really making this hard for yourself!

Lee Tom
 
ok...

bad mistake. apparently, I should NOT have used secure empty. why am I so paranoid over nothing???????? :confused:

right now, it's still at 564 items to destroy! this is going to take forever, and my PowerBook is frying itself (literally, I need to get an iCurve now)
 
LeeTom said:
Yeah, secure empty takes a long time. Boy, you're really making this hard for yourself!

Lee Tom
Click to expand...

Ok. finally aborted secure empty. recclaimed all my space (61.9 GB free)

So I am going to start fresh, this time from a NON-FileVault account.

Thanks for the help, and if you guys have any more advice, I'll check here!
 
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