iMovie, iPhoto, and Aperture 3 video?

[peejer]

I tried to look this up so sorry if it's been hashed out before.

I use all three programs for various things. iPhoto get's my iphone videos, Aperture 3 has been getting my photos, videos since i've bought it, but iMovie has my older footage.

Some questions I have: 1) Do I have a bunch of duplicate files or are these referenced somehwere? I know that iMovie has them in my ~user library, and iPhoto has them in the iPhoto library. So Aperture has them in its library?
2) Does iMovie then reference these other files?

3) My plan is to download all videos/photos to Aperture 3 going forwards. I'd like to have everything, the old and new stuff, in one place (preferably Aperture). Any thoughts on how to do this?

4) What I'd like to do with my video in the future is download in Aperture and apply metadata and then use iMovie or FCE in the future.

Thanks in advance!

 

[spice weasel]

Effectively, all of your footage is already in "one place," because the iLife media browser allows you to easily share your media library between applications. So there's no need to move anything out of iMovie and into iPhoto or Aperture. When you launch iMovie, you'll notice that your iPhoto and Aperture video is already there. The actual files are stored in different locations depending on how you imported them, but that doesn't really matter. The media browser makes them available across the iLife suite.

I'd say that there's no real reason to move your older videos to Aperture, but if you want to you can simply choose Import and then find the file in the Finder, or export from iMovie and then import into Aperture.

 

[peejer]

Thanks Spice!

I should have thought about it in those terms but didn't cross my mind.