What's the best way to keep Video Files?

[leahzpw]

I have some video clips in iPhoto and some in iMovie.
When I was using earlier versions of iPhoto and iMovie, I was in the process of moving all of my videos (taken on iPhone, usually) out of iPhoto and into iMovie because iPhoto could not play them easily within the program.

What's the best way to keep them now?
In iPhoto? In iMovie? Somewhere else?
I don't want to have duplicates of the same clips taking up space on my hard drive.
And I want to be able to view and use the clips most easily.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

1. Go to the trouble of learning to use iMovie (or better) to edit and render them into final form (perfected videos with just the edits you'll ever want to see).
2. Render them at the highest quality to a mp4 or m4v file
3. Store those in iTunes (where they can be tagged, organized, etc)
4. Copy the originals to at least 1 secondary hard drive for backup storage. Hard drives are cheap; buy at least 1 for this and use it.
5. Burn your rendered files from #2 to DVD or BD discs.
6. Store #4 and/or #5 off site so that if your home is robbed, flooded, burned and you lose your files, these movies can be recovered from off-site backups

I'm guessing at least some of these movies are dear to you. Losing them because you want to save hard drive space or won't spend a few dollars on #4 or #5 is a very poor decision. Home movies can become precious with time. If you were to lose them, would you miss them? If the the answer is "yes", spend some money on #4 & #5 and do #1-6.

By the way, storing the original imported video #1 will eat up more space than storing the edited, perfected and rendered videos #2. So if money is too tight for #4 or #5, you could solely focus on backing up #2 renders instead of #1. The downside to this is that future video codecs would likely require rendering again. Each generation of renders will lose quality. Keeping the originals would make it possible to render to future codecs at maximum quality.