Imovie question from a new user..

[kjvi5]

Have a 2 day old Imac that I'm in the process of transferring all my files on to from an external hard drive that I used for my pc.

Itunes music all transferred without a hitch, and all my pictures are now in iphoto which is also a biggie.

The issue is that now I'm tackling the 30 years of home movies I have that I want to move to the mac. Right now on the external hard drive I have about 20 folders (categorized by year) and each contains anywhere from 5-20 .avi files.

My question is twofold:
1)Where is the best place to just store these movies for browsing and viewing (ie. not editing or creating projects.) so that if I sit down and want to watch the video of my daughter's first birthday I can just click on it and view it in quick time or whichever without all the sidebar apps that imovie has which are all editing functions.

2) When in imovie I went to import a file to the events category it did the following: For example I went to the 1986 folder on the external drive, and clicked on the "Christmas 1986" avi file, and when it prompted me to name it I named it "Christmas 1986" as the event. The problem is that once it imported it, it put "Christmas 1986" under a tab (it looked like a yellow car battery) called "2005". Now presumably this is because 2005 was the year I created all these files when I transferred them on to my pc. However, imovie won't let me change the header category. It lets me change the individual event name but won't let me do anything with the header category and I'd rather not have everything categorized under "2005".

Any advice or recommendations would be helpful. I did do a search on here and found nothing similar to what I'm looking for here.

Thanks in advance.

 

[thegrifman]

First of all, welcome to Macrumors and to the Mac world in general

1) The best place for your already made movies is in your Movies folder that you'll find in the sidebar of finder. If you put them there you can use Frontrow to browse through them and watch them or just browse th rough the finder and open them up in quicktime.

2) iMovie is really only for editing and creating movies, not so much for organizing like iPhoto so you may not want to even bother importing existing ones in unless you want to make changes. That said, if making changes is what you're after, I unfortunately don't know how to fix the header as I'm not an iMovie '08 user, I prefer to stick with iMovie '06 which I think is much better. If you'd like to give it a shot you can download it here: http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/imovieHD6.html

*Edit: When you put your movies in the Movies folder you can keep the same folder structure that you had on your windows PC and Frontrow will recognize that.

 

[kjvi5]

First of all, welcome to Macrumors and to the Mac world in general

1) The best place for your already made movies is in your Movies folder that you'll find in the sidebar of finder. If you put them there you can use Frontrow to browse through them and watch them or just browse th rough the finder and open them up in quicktime.

2) iMovie is really only for editing and creating movies, not so much for organizing like iPhoto so you may not want to even bother importing existing ones in unless you want to make changes. That said, if making changes is what you're after, I unfortunately don't know how to fix the header as I'm not an iMovie '08 user, I prefer to stick with iMovie '06 which I think is much better. If you'd like to give it a shot you can download it here: http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/imovieHD6.html

*Edit: When you put your movies in the Movies folder you can keep the same folder structure that you had on your windows PC and Frontrow will recognize that.

Thank you. I don't plan on doing much editing so I'd really like to just have all my movies stored in one spot for view.

This may be a dumb question but is Frontrow an app that is already on my computer? It's not on the dock and I really haven't fully delved down into the other apps yet.

Thanks again this is exactly what I was looking for.

 

[Clusty]

Thank you. I don't plan on doing much editing so I'd really like to just have all my movies stored in one spot for view.

This may be a dumb question but is Frontrow an app that is already on my computer? It's not on the dock and I really haven't fully delved down into the other apps yet.

Thanks again this is exactly what I was looking for.

Yes, it is. If you look in the box your mac came in, there should be a little white remote. Click the menu button on that while pointing it at your mac. Front Row should appear.

 

[davidwarren]

or you can hit command (open apple) and esc, that will take you to front row also.