dinky2

Q: Tagging camera archive files imovie

Since a few weeks I own a Sony HD camera, recording to SD card. Once in a while I will have to unload the videos from this card to my iMac. Fortunately iMovie has the "Archive all" feature to do this, storing the clips from the SD card into a camera archive as individual files per clip. Over time, however, this will become an unmanageable bunch of clips and finding the right clips to compose a video would require a lot of work going through all of them. Is there a way to tag these clips, just as you would do with photo's ? Importing would then be a lot easier by first finding all clips matching certain criteria. So far I have not been able to find such a feature in iMovie itself.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8), iMovie '11

Posted on Sep 9, 2012 11:33 AM

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Q: Tagging camera archive files imovie

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  • by AppleMan1958,

    AppleMan1958 AppleMan1958 Sep 9, 2012 8:00 PM in response to dinky2
    Level 7 (27,430 points)
    Sep 9, 2012 8:00 PM in response to dinky2

    The way iMovie is designed, you need to import the archived clips into an iMovie Event. Once you have done so, it is easy to tag them. iMovie will sort video into Events based on day. You can further divide the events or combine events if you need to. You can go further by using keywords.

     

    Archiving is for bulk storage. It is useful because it stores an exact duplicate of what is on the camera SD card.

    When you import into an Event, it is converted to an editing format called AVCHD. (For why, see this link - https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3941 )

     

     

    See this link for how to tag video..

    http://help.apple.com/imovie/#mov3ac69b39

     

    Also here is a good Tutorial which includes tagging video with keywords.

    http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/imovie_09_stone.html#Event%20Library

     

    See also this video on keywords. It is for an older version of iMovie, but it is still applicable, with a few improvements in the new version.

    http://www.apple.com/findouthow/movies/imovie08.html#tag

  • by dinky2,

    dinky2 dinky2 Sep 10, 2012 1:09 AM in response to AppleMan1958
    Level 1 (18 points)
    iPhone
    Sep 10, 2012 1:09 AM in response to AppleMan1958

    Wow, thanks for the extensive answer !

     

    This, however, is not exactly what I'm looking for. I know I can tag clips in events, but I would like to be able to tag the basic source, the archive files. I see not much point in storing the same data twice, first as an archive and then as an event. Especially since the clips in iMovie events are about 10 times the size of the archive files ! As an example: I have an archive of 71 clips taking up 1,98GB. When imported into iMovie I have 68 clips taking up 18,52GB. So I want to get rid of the events after composing the video.

     

    I come from a tape based video camera and up till now I kept my own registration of what was where on which tape, allowing me to select the scenes I needed for a particular video. These clips where then imported into events to edit the video. I would like to keep this workflow, but replace my own registration with tagged archive files.

     

    Assume I will need to stick to the old routine but use the archive files instead of the tapes.

  • by John Cogdell,

    John Cogdell John Cogdell Sep 10, 2012 2:44 AM in response to dinky2
    Level 5 (4,605 points)
    Sep 10, 2012 2:44 AM in response to dinky2

    One option worth considering is to append a tag to the name of each .mts (or .m2ts) clip in the archive. For example, the file might be named 000020.mts (or .m2ts). Change this to 000020 football.mts, where football is the tag. You should then be able to search on the tag. I haven't tried this, but think it will work. Perhaps AppleMan will have a view on this. Hopefully, renaming clips will not disrupt the archive in any way.

     

    John

     

    Message was edited by: John Cogdell

  • by dinky2,

    dinky2 dinky2 Sep 10, 2012 4:57 AM in response to John Cogdell
    Level 1 (18 points)
    iPhone
    Sep 10, 2012 4:57 AM in response to John Cogdell

    Thanks for the suggestion, John. I was thinking of using Spotlight to add tags to the files. It's not exactly what I'm looking for, because I was hoping to do everything from within the Archive GUI and there is no list of keywords used before to choose from.

     

    I was also wondering if renaming or deleting clips from the archive would cause problems. Don't know if there is an index of some sort that should match the real files. Just a matter of trying, I suppose.

  • by John Cogdell,

    John Cogdell John Cogdell Sep 10, 2012 5:15 AM in response to dinky2
    Level 5 (4,605 points)
    Sep 10, 2012 5:15 AM in response to dinky2

    It might be worthwhile creating an "Archive All" of a few test clips from a separate SD card containing just those clips. You probably already know that Archive All doesn't allow you to select individual clips from the card - it's an all or nothing process unfortunately. I know that AppleMan1958 usually reformats his cards (in the camera) after doing an archive, so that next time he has a clean archive of just his new clips.

     

    Anyway, back to what I was suggesting. Test your "Test Archive" by renaming clips as I mentioned earlier. Your point about the Index is probably valid, as iMovie requires the full structure from the camera - not just the AVCHD .mts files. But a short test will give you the answer. It's not the ideal solution, but better than nothing!

     

    John