is my iPhoto broken or am I doing it wrong?

[Howmanyds]

My videos transfer in to iPhoto along with the pictures from my DSLR. I would like to trim just a bit off the beginning and end in order to upload to youtube. Apparently, after trimming in iPhoto, which is remarkably easy, there's absolutely no easy way to get the movie OUT of iPhoto. You can't email it, you can't upload to youtube. I tried uploading to facebook but the compression was horrible. When I drag to the desktop, apparently it's only dragging an alias because the file is less than a MB and it won't open in Quicktime.

I dragged to iMovie (not wanting to wait around for iMovie to auto-create thumbnails for iPhoto movies) and it looked like it was going to work. However, the upload to youTube took half a second so something was still wrong. Obviously youTube said it couldn't play the movie. I could see the whole movie in iMovie, but perhaps it was still just using an alias from iPhoto. When I do a standard export to the desktop, once again it's a tiny file which plays with preview but is a black screen in QT. Only the "Export using Quicktime" option works, but this took about an hour to export a 2.5 minute video. That's an absurd amount of time wasted just to knock a few seconds off the beginning and end of the movie.

Am I missing something?

 

[Dave Braine]

How, exactly, are you trimming the video in iPhoto? If you double click on a video in iPhoto, it should open in Quicktime. You should then be able to trim and then save it to Finder as a full movie.

Also, if you drag it out of iPhoto onto the Desktop, you should get the full movie, not an alias, just as you would if you dragged out a photo.

 

[Howmanyds]

When I double click a video from my iPhoto events page, it simply opens the movie within iPhoto and starts playing it. If I click command+E to edit, it says the movie can't be edited, but rather to use the Action menu. So that's how I do it, from the Action menu --> trim. Then if I drag it to the desktop, it drags the edited file, which as we all know is not a whole video file within iPhoto, just the edits, so of course it's not playable anywhere else. Presumably, if I didn't edit the file at all, I could drag it to the desktop and it would drag the original full file. I managed to find the original file in the finder and open that it QT manually, which allowed an easy trim and upload to youTube. But it would be nice to have the file open in QT automatically from iPhoto, as you're suggesting it should.

 

[Dave Braine]

Which OS/iPhoto version are you using? Perhaps it's a Lion thing as I'm on Snow Leopard with iPhoto9.

 

[Howmanyds]

Yes, maybe. I'm on 10.7.3 with iPhoto '11