Reducing Clips and Saving in Imovie

I'm having a similar problem.

I am trying to save disk space too. I have been taking my raw footage that I have captured and trimming the clips down to only what I need. After I trim the clips (by cutting, then pasting, and then deleting) I regain a small amount of disk space, but not much.

I have noticed that even after I empty the trash, I can still "revert to original" the clips I have trimmed. I shouldn't be able to do this if the clips I don't want have actually been deleted, right? The clips are still on my HD somewhere which means they're taking up space. How do I get rid of them for real?

IMovie HD does what's called non-destructive editing. When you remove parts of a clip, the original source material is always retained. That lets you restore a clip to its original state at any time, and recover from goofs.

So long as any clip uses a particular Media file, that Media file is never shortened nor discarded. When the LAST clip of a file is deleted, the Media file is discarded when you empty the iMovie trash. But never before.

If disk space is a problem, the solution is to buy an external hard drive where you store/edit your projects. Drives are cheap today, so that's a good solution.

When that's not possible, the project can be exported back to the camera, then re-imported to a new project. The clips you cut from the first project will remain on the cutting room floor.

One benefit of iMovie HD's non-destructive editing feature is that projects are no longer as vulnerable to the corruption that occurred in iMovie 2, iMovie 3 and iMovie 4. In those versions emptying the iMovie trash could lead to major problems, including complete destruction of the project.

There are lots of threads here that discuss the pros and cons of non-destructive editing. Search the forum for "non-destructive" to locate them.

If you export back to tape can you reuse it like a hard drive or do you lose quality.

There will be no loss of quality. The video is digital material, so it can move back and forth between the camera and iMovie with no change in quality. It's not necessary to use new tapes. (Unless your tape has been used many times, of course. On the contrary pros sometimes advise against using a new -- i.e. untested -- tape for important material.)

Karl

Do you have iMovie4 still? If so, use that to load and trim the original clips. Save, then empty trash, then save again and quit. Now load the project into iMovie HD and do your detailed editing on the shortened clips.

Thanks for the explanation on why the clips won't delete and for the tips on using tapes.

I have since discovered a strange anomaly with iDVD5.

It will happily load iMovie4 projects but will not recognise an iMovie HD project which has simply been loaded as an iMovie4 project and then saved using "Save As". There is normally a folder hidden within the project and called "Shared Movies" and this is not created until you have modified the project within iMovie HD.

This is not normally an issue but I had several small projects edited in iMovie4 which I simply converted for importing into iDVD5 which refused to find them until I modified the length of a title then changed it back (explicitly and not I believe with undo) and saved the file again.

I think that non-destructive editing is great, but it's downright stupid to not allow for any simple way to throw away parts of a clip. I have hours of footage, some clips several minutes long with only a few seconds of usable footage. iMovie should allow you to copy and paste those few seconds then throw out the main clip--but it does not. An incredibly bad feature. Sorry for the ranting, but now I have the option of blowing a few hundred dollars on an extrenal HDD that I should not need, or not making the movie I want.

...but now I have the option of blowing a few hundred dollars on an extrenal HDD that I should not need, or not making the movie I want.

How does this feature prevent us from making the movie we want? Isn't the same disk space required when we import video from the camera, whether or not iMovie does non-destructive editing? Won't a one-hour shoot require 12 GB of disk space nonetheless?

Storing finished projects on a disk requires more disk space, Yes, but I don't understand how editing is affected all that much. And if disk space to store a project is an issue, we can use one of the space-saving methods described earlier.

If we don't want to bother with those, we can buy a cheap drive. On the first page I went to, a 250GB FW drive costs $179. (There are cheaper.) That holds about 21 hours of video, or $8.57 per hour. If the average project is 20 minutes long, that's less than $3 a project. Which, considering today's disk prices, is probably considerably less than we paid to store projects in earlier versions of iMovie.

I'm happy.

Karl