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iMovie file becoming HUGE!

P

p0intblank

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Sep 20, 2005
2,548
2
New Jersey
I'm working on a video and have done a ton of editing on it so far. I understand iMovie uses non-destructive editing so technically the entire clips are being hidden. Is there any way to delete my original clips and only keep the edited parts? The file is already over 25 GB large... and my hard drive is practically filled up. :eek:

Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks. :)
 
Your iMovie project contains all files used, just right-click and choose show content.

iMovie files are actually just a special sort of folder. (that's why even large files can be stored on FAT32 drives)
 
applemacdude said:
the garbage can in the right bottom corner.. click on it and empty it
Click to expand...


To elaborate: In iMovie you have your clip panes right? Take all that footage that is not going to ever go into your timeline and drag it to the little trashcan to the right bottom hand corner of iMovie. Once you have moved all the unwanted clips there, click on the trash can and you should see a option to empty the trash can. Empty it and your clean :)
 
Does anyone know any good converters I could download, the file I have is 503 MB, I need it 100 MB to get it on youtube.....
 
AutumnSkyline said:
Does anyone know any good converters I could download, the file I have is 503 MB, I need it 100 MB to get it on youtube.....
Click to expand...

is it created by imovie? i thought you can dramatically compress it and decrease the resolution...
 
The trash is empty. I always empty it since it fills up so fast. The reason why the movie is so large is because it's a compilation of all the videos I made up until now. I'm presenting different segments of each clip, therefore the original content is technically hidden under the edited material. I found the folder in the Finder where all the raw content is located. If I delete those .dv files, will the clips in my iMovie project be deleted as well?

And in case you're wondering, the video is up 2 minutes, 21 seconds long... so that's not bad at all. I plan to go up to around 5 minutes. By the way the file size is 26.15 GB.

Thanks for the help! :)
 
AutumnSkyline said:
Does anyone know any good converters I could download, the file I have is 503 MB, I need it 100 MB to get it on youtube.....
Click to expand...

That's quite easy in iMovie.

For YouTube, you should use the Quicktime option, and choose advanced (or something like that)
You should encode it using MPEG-4, (H.264), at a resolution of 320x240

for iPod (and also looking good on the web) you can have a look at this webcast

that should give you a decent size.


Do NOT buy Quicktime Pro to encode. iMovie does all of that.
 
Allways too big

:mad: B]:mad: [/B]I am having trouble burning a dvd in the new virsion too.
I imported 60 minutes of an autorace from my camcorder and no matter how much I seem to edit, I am told its too big. A dvd-r is supposed to hold two hours of video so this is confusing at best.
Any ideas?
10.3.9 512mb of ram, iMac
 
p0intblank said:
The trash is empty. I always empty it since it fills up so fast. The reason why the movie is so large is because it's a compilation of all the videos I made up until now. I'm presenting different segments of each clip, therefore the original content is technically hidden under the edited material. I found the folder in the Finder where all the raw content is located. If I delete those .dv files, will the clips in my iMovie project be deleted as well?

And in case you're wondering, the video is up 2 minutes, 21 seconds long... so that's not bad at all. I plan to go up to around 5 minutes. By the way the file size is 26.15 GB.

Thanks for the help! :)
Click to expand...

Sorry to bump this old, old thread but I'm curious on this issue as well. I'm making a video with iMovie 6 HD and importing huge clips I captured off my TV of video games. Well after I import the video I edit the large 10-25 minute clip down to several clips of only 10-35 seconds. The rest I cut/clear out (which go in the trash) then I clear the trash but no storage is freed.

So I did with this poster did and went into Finder and looked at the package contents of my iMovie file (which is 11+ GB now) and see that it includes all the full clips, some that are 1-5 GB big when I cut out about 90% of each clip and only kept small parts.

So why are the big files still there? I'm scared if I delete these files then obviously my edited clips will be deleted to? Can anyone confirm this?

EDIT: Found out there is nothing you can do to delete the full files yet keep the edited ones. So I just deleted my iMovie project and edit the files before I import them into iMovie and not only is it 103993x quicker it also saves me much more time. Sorry!
 
I've just created a 90 second video that's over 13 Gig in size!! I expect this is because I imported several huge video segments from which I extracted only a few seconds total. I've deleted the original files and emptied the trash, but the file size doesn't get any smaller . . . ????
 
Khryz said:
Sorry to bump this old, old thread but I'm curious on this issue as well. I'm making a video with iMovie 6 HD and importing huge clips I captured off my TV of video games. Well after I import the video I edit the large 10-25 minute clip down to several clips of only 10-35 seconds. The rest I cut/clear out (which go in the trash) then I clear the trash but no storage is freed.

So I did with this poster did and went into Finder and looked at the package contents of my iMovie file (which is 11+ GB now) and see that it includes all the full clips, some that are 1-5 GB big when I cut out about 90% of each clip and only kept small parts.

So why are the big files still there? I'm scared if I delete these files then obviously my edited clips will be deleted to? Can anyone confirm this?

EDIT: Found out there is nothing you can do to delete the full files yet keep the edited ones. So I just deleted my iMovie project and edit the files before I import them into iMovie and not only is it 103993x quicker it also saves me much more time. Sorry!
Click to expand...

What did you use to edit the files before you import them to iMovie. I am trying to do the same thing. I want short clips of long items already importrd to iMovie and I want to consolidate them.

Harry
 
iMovie is 'non-destructive'. That means that whatever you do in the application, your original footage from your camcorder remains untouched. 'Trashing' won't get rid of any footage you imported from your camcorder.

If you want to save hard drive space, you could do this:
  • Cut the bits you want from your footage and place them on the timeline.
  • Export them as 'full quality'.
  • Import this Quicktime file into a new project and cut the video back into clips as desired.
  • Delete the original iMovie project.

I've never done this, but I see no reason why it wouldn't work. Might be a good idea to check at each stage to make sure you're not deleting stuff you want.
 
I tried what KiethPratt suggested -- export the desired segment and then import into iMovie and it worked. The exported segment became a DV file containing only selected the portion of my large iMovie. I now had a short segment that I could work with. It is a little time consuming but it is the first workable solution that I have seen. Thanks for the tip.
 
Seems the conclusion is that iMovie will not allow you to delete the original large video clips . . . so now I'm looking on line for a simple application for Mac that will allow you to break videos into smaller 'pieces'... seems to be lots of them for Windows . . . is there anything like that for Mac? Although I can see that it would work, there's got to be an easier way than the way KiethPratt has described . . . ?
 
Couldn't you just download the previous version to iMovie, the DVD Maker from Apple as a free download? And then use that, then reimport the file back into iMovie?
 
Can I delete raw files?

Hi,

I have a large iMovie Project (around 7gb) shot on a Sony Handycam DCR-SR70. My camera files are in MPEG-4 so i have to convert them using MPEG-Streamclip (very lengthy and not free). I convert them to DV and save them in a 'converted' folder then drag and drop into imovie when needed. After i have them in iMovie, the raw files are still there... will deleting them damage my project? Maybe a naive question but better safe than sorry!

Thanks a bunch and sorry if i have posted this in the wrong place!

Sam
:apple:
 
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