iMovie noob. Question about transferring video to external HDD...

[ChitoCrisis]

If I'm using incorrect terms, excuse me. I'm a noob.

Any how, I transferred everything from my HD camcorder to my MacBook Pro on iMovie. It's still there of course.

So to transfer that to an external HDD, do I locate the files in the iMovie folder or something? I don't want to make a mistake with this because it took a long time to transfer it to my computer and I don't want to do it again. I simply want to transfer it to an external HDD to use later and I'll delete the original video from the camcorder because it takes up space in the camcorders HDD.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

[ChitoCrisis]

By the way, will there be a problem moving all those files in my external hdd? The folder containing all the videos (that I imported using iMovie from my camcorder) are over 130 GB. I don't know if there's another way I can do this or not. If so, it would be amazing considering I use Mac and my father uses Windows. I don't know if the files I'm going to move to the HDD will be compatible with both.

 

[De Rocca]

What kind of camera do you have ? Tape based or memory-stick/hdd based/SD-card?

For memory-stick/HDD/SD-card :
Imovie has the option to 'archive' the files straight from your camera, keeping it in the original directory structure.

This way, it stays compact (when you import to Imovie/FCP it will be much bigger due to the AIC codec)

At the moment when you want to start working with it, you can import it in Imovie or Whatever package you want.

Kind regards,
Wim

 

[ChitoCrisis]

Well I imported it as "archive all" in iMovie and transferred it to my external HDD. All those files that were in the high definition camcorder came out to be a total of 52 gb.

I had imported all those videos using iMovie to high definition .mov and that's the 130 gb files. I'm transferring those to my external hdd as well just in case.

With the "archived" files (basically an exact copy of everything that was in the camcorder), I'll be able to use them on any computer and any video editing software right?

Also, is there a reason the archived files are about 50 gb while the imported iMovie files 130 gb? I would imagine the converted files would be around 75 gb not 130 gb.

 

[De Rocca]

Hi,

I advice you to use the imovie camera archive option to backup the files for later use.
With a good player VLC or Mplayer or something, you can play them.

Only transcode them in Imovie (import) if you want to work on them. After creating your movie/dvd,... throw away the imported bunch ;-)


Importing the file in Imovie is making it much bigger because the AIC converts the file to a file where every frame is complete, whereas AVCHD is a format where each frame is based on previous ones.