iMovie Massive File Export Guide (Even 24+ Hours)

Video is under 24 hours long

If this is the case, then you are overloading your system. The first step is to check and see if your system has enough memory to store the entire video at your selected settings. To do this, you need to know your total video's file size. To find this, click the tiny square with an arrow pointed upwards out of it and then "Export File". This will bring up a window after a few moments. If the section reading "Format" has "Video and Audio" next to it, skip the next sentence. If the section reading "Format" does not have "Video and Audio" next to it, please click the text and change it to say "Video and Audio". Now, you should be able to see the total size of your file underneath the video preview. See the image below. The file size is in the red circle. DO NOT HIT THE "NEXT..." BUTTON YET.

Now that you know the file size of your video, you need to check and make sure your computer has enough storage to actually hold that exported file. I am assuming you are on a Mac device running MacOS. If you are not, you will need to figure out how much space you have on your own. If you are on a Mac, then mouse up to the top left of your screen. There will be an Apple logo there. Click it. A dropdown menu will show up. Click "About This Mac." A small window will show in. From here, click the "Storage" tab on the tab bar of the window. There should be a section here titled "Macintosh HD" or something similar. This is the storage of your computer. There will be a section of text saying "____ GB available of _____ GB". These two spaced will vary based on your computer. See the image below for a visual of where these numbers are.

Just be sure that the first number of GB is at least 10 GB larger than the size of your file. If this is true, skip to the next paragraph. If the number is smaller than your file size, you are likely not able to export your file because your computer does not have enough space. You can easily fix this by clicking the "Manage..." button. This will open another window. Here you can sort through all of your files, apps, and other items to see what you can delete from your system. Continue removing things until you have enough space on your computer to save the video. If you can't delete enough things, consider buying an external hard drive or flash drive, copying large files you don't need all the time over to the new device, and then removing them from your computer. This way you can simply open the files from the flash drive, but they don't take up space on your computer.

Now that you are sure that you have enough space on your computer, you can retry the export. If it still fails to export, you are overloading iMovie. There is only one solution to this that I have found. To view this, please skip down to the bold and underlined section titled "Video Splitting for Export".

Exporting Your Section Projects

If your total video is at or over 24 hours long, you need to check and see if your computer has enough space to store the clips by checking the files size of each split section, add the file sizes all together, and then comparing the total file size to your computer's open memory. This needs to happen to the split sections because your original 24+ hour file does not show the proper file size similar to how it doesn't show the correct time length.  Please see the section above titled "Video is under 24 hours long" to see the pictures of where you can find the size of each section. I would just show you here, but this reply box has limited me to how many photos I can put on it.

Now that you have each section of your project in its own new project, you need to start exporting these. You can  begin the export of all of these at once. However, this will take an extremely long time and is risky. I recommend you export 1 of the new projects at a time. I also highly recommend you do them in chronological order for organization.

You can export to a flash drive. I do not recommend this. These exports take hours. Each one of mine took roughly 5 hours or more to complete, a few took 8 hours. If the flash drive gets bumped or disconnected anytime during this time, the whole export gets canceled or otherwise messed up. Exporting to your computer is much safer.

To export, open your first section project. Click the timeline anywhere once or twice and wait a moment for all the images in the timeline to load properly. Then click the square with an arrow pointing out the top on the top right corner of the screen. Choose your selected settings. (Be aware that changing these settings may change the overall size of the file. Make sure you use the same settings you did when you figured out that your computer had enough space to store the file.) Now you wait. You can use your computer for other things, just don't run anything that is a heavy program that would consume a lot of your computers computing power unless you are certain your computer can handle it. Running a program that is too heavy while exporting may ruin the export, freeze iMovie, or even crash your whole computer.

Once the first movie is done, check the top corner of your Mac or the notifications on it for a message from iMovie saying "The Export was successful". If it was successful start the second. You can start the next one immediately after the previous finished. If it was not successful, try it again. If it fails a second time, you may need to split that troublesome section into another pair of shorter sections in iMovie and try those.

Once you have at last gotten all of the sections off of iMovie, now you need to recombine them. See the bold and underlined section "Recombining the Exported Sections" for more help there.

Recombining the Exported Sections

First step, you need to either have DOUBLE the space that your original video was going to take up on your computer. This is because the split videos and recombined videos have to briefly exist on your computer at the same time, which doubles the file size.

You can move all of the sectioned exports over to flash drives so long as you can attach all of the flash drives you use to your computer at once. With Macs, this is easier said than done.

Please figure out a way to get another section of space that is the exact size of the original file size in iMovie. This part may be challenging.

There is also an issue here with a 24 hour time here. Please see your section below.

If your original video was under 24 hours:

You might have it easier here. Open QuickTime Player, an app with comes preinstalled on MacOS.

Locate the first of your sectioned exports. You have to do this chronologically or your video will be all out of order. Open the first video with QuickTime Player. Make the window small, so that you can see your desktop. Open the location that you saved your sectioned exports to. Drag the second video onto the frame of QuickTime and drop it. Repeat with the third, then the fourth, and so on for all the clips. Once all clips have been dragged and dropped into QuickTime, save the total video. (This can be done by closing QuickTime with the red dot in the corner oddly enough.) Be sure to enter a good name and place to save it to. Give QuickTime a long time to crank out the whole saved video. 

I have not had any issues with QuickTime freezing in the process despite insane file sizes. I am talking 160 GB of stuff here. QuickTime seems to be a tank.

Once QuickTime gets that file done, which may take multiple hours, you can check your combined file by playing it with QuickTime. Check for sound. QuickTime may have deleted the sound from your video by recombining them. If not, then congrats! You did it! You are done. Delete the sectioned exports from iMovie, keeping only the whole big video, and you are golden. If you don't have sound, you are in a small predicament. However, you are still safe to delete the sectioned exports from iMovie and keep only the mute combined file on your computer to free up space. To get the sound back, you need to go back into iMovie to the original project before any of the splitting. Export the video again using the "Export File" button, but you need to change a setting. In the export window, there is a "Format" section. Change the text next to it to "Audio Only" and hit the "Next..." button. Despite the length of the video, exporting only the audio will only take about 10 minutes maybe, or at least it did for mine.

Once you have the audio file, use a third party program other than iMovie to stick the audio back onto the mute video you have. If it is not quite in sync, go back into iMovie, make a copy of your whole main project, add or subtract a tiny interval of video to get it on the right timing, re-export the audio only again, and try to stitch it back on. This might take some trail and error to get perfect, but it only takes maybe 10 minutes per attempt instead of many hours. Once you are satisfied with the audio, congrats! You have completed the video! You can delete everything but your final copy of your completed video.

Video Splitting for Export

If you made it here, you need to split your video into at least two parts. If it is under 24 hours, you will have to do some trial and error with how many equal splits to do in your video. If it is over 24 hours, I actually recommend splitting it into at least 8 equal parts. As a rule of thumb, I recommend keeping each split section under 4 hours. To do this, you have two options. I recommend you view both and choose the better option for you.

Method 1) Use the splits already in your video from where you put in multiple clips.

Method 2) Split the video in exact places using the "split" command.

Wait! I tried something else more out of curiosity than hopes of success. I saw somebody had compressed a file for YouTube and had gotten it to work. I still didn't think it will work for a video of this size, but I searched into it. I found a video that directed me to an open source app called HandBrake 1.3.3. It is apparently a powerful video compressor that works really well for getting files compressed to YouTube standards. YouTube can apparently read compressed videos. In fact, it compresses them for you when you upload them. So why not? I gave it a shot.

This app completely took over my computer's CPU. It was running it above 700% in the Activity Monitor. That was obviously not a great situation, so I stopped the first attempt. I took a quick look online to see if there was any way to limit or throttle the CPU usage of running Mac apps. To my surprise, I quickly found an app called AppPolice that literally does just that. You open it up with the menu bar way up at the top of the Mac (the one you scroll up to the top of the screen to reveal it), click it, click running apps, and select the HandBrake app in it. I dropped the maximum CPU usage on the HandBrake app way down to 50%. That worked! It made the app take forever, but it let me actually use my computer.

Even with this CPU throttle, HandBrake still caused quite a significant amount of heat on the bottom of the Mac. I set up a desk fan on the thing and just let it blow on it. This amazingly helped quite a lot. I still paused HandBrake using the button built right into the app whenever I needed to use my computer or whenever I felt it getting too hot. This drops the CPU usage down to around 0.2% or even nothing and allows the Mac to cool itself off.

A few days later of off and on running of HandBrake and it spit out a 33.7 GB file. That is a noticeable drop from the original 98.73 GB. Maybe YouTube will process that thing. I chucked it on the uploader.

As per usual, it reached 100% uploading and started the SD video processing. (It goes back and does another processing session for the HD, but allows you to work with your video while it does it to save you time.) This time, however, the video is actually making progress on the SD video processing! Before, it would hang indefinitely at 0% SD processing and then display an error reading "Processing abandoned. This video could not be processed." Now it has officially made it 3% of the way through the SD processing stage without any error.

Now this is obviously not a lot of progress for the SD processing, but it is certainly a huge step in the right direction for getting this video onto YouTube.

It may still fail, but there is new hope.

I will let you know if it worked or not.

Possible Fix for Audio Deletion of Large Files

This is the one thing I have not figured out how to fix.

We can't use iMovie to recombine the video and audio since iMovie can't export more than 24 hours or large files, as in the whole purpose of this post.

You can use an external program to do this, but I have found an extremely large majority of these programs cannot handle the shear size of the file. I have tried so many of them. None have worked.

The only thing I have that might work is YouTube. But first, we need the audio files.

Open iMovie once more. Get the original, unsplit video. Copy the first big chunk, preferably half if the half is under 24 hours. Past the first chunk in one new project, the second in another, and so on if you need more space. Save and name each of them. I recommend putting "(audio)" after the names of them to signify that these are only to get the audio files. Open the first of these new projects you just made. Now, open the export menu. Locate the "Format" text. Change the text next to it to "Audio Only" and hit the "Next..." button to start the export. This will take a very short time. My first half took 6 minutes to export the audio. Repeat for the second part and so on to get the audio out of each of them.

Make a YouTube account. Get it verified. There are tons of tutorials on that subject. Once you have a verified account, move on to the next paragraph.

Try to upload your entire mute video onto YouTube. This will likely take forever. The policies for YouTube may also change to prevent large videos from uploading, so check that first. If they say they won't allow it, try it anyway, but understand if they prevent the video.

Do note that you can upload the video as "Private" so nobody else in the world can see it but you. That way you dont have to worry about your privacy to the public.

Once the video is finally uploaded, which may take even a week or more depending on your internet, go back to YouTube. Click your profile in the top right corner. From the menu, click YouTube Studio.

In YouTube Studio, click Videos. Locate the video you want the sound on from the list. Open it by clicking it's previewed image. This will open another window with a bunch of details of your video. Locate and click the box with the word "Editor" on the left side.

Now in the middle of your screen there will be a preview of your video. There will also be a row with a music note. Upload your audio files in chronological order to this row. Save the changes once they are on there with the big save button on the top right corner. Then wait a bit and go view your video on your channel. It may take some time for the video to get sound added on it.

If your video has sound, you have succeeded! You can now download the video with sound back onto your computer if you need to. Please look up how to download your own YouTube video from your channel on the internet. There are videos to show you how.

Again, I have not seen if this last YouTube part will work. Use it at your own risk.

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As of now, the upload was successful, but YouTube failed to process my massive video. That means it went through to YouTube, but YouTube cannot handle a video of this size. This, unfortunately, means it may not be possible to combine the sound and audio files with YouTube. This will work for smaller files. I have already successfully done that. Just maybe not something of this scale.

Video is at or over 24 hours long

You are in for a ride here. It is in fact possible to get this done, but be prepared for it to take a while. You have been warned.

The first step in this case is to make sure iMovie is in fact going to mess up your export. This will result in a video that is far shorter than the complete length of your video if it is true. To check this, click the tiny square with an arrow pointed upwards out of it and then "Export File". This will bring up a window after a few moments. If the section reading "Format" has "Video and Audio" next to it, skip the next sentence. If the section reading "Format" does not have "Video and Audio" next to it, please click the text and change it to say "Video and Audio". Now, you should be able to see the length of your video. See the image below. The red circle shows the location of the length of your exported video. Do not that this may not be the same length as your total video.

If your video is over 24 hours long, this time in the Export window should not be the same as the total time of your video. If it is the same, I am sorry, but I cannot help you as I have never had that happen to me.

The times are not the same because iMovie apparently cannot export over 24 hours of video in one video. It will cut off the first 24 hours of time and only export the first part of the video of the remaining time past 24 hours. That is a lot to take in. Notice in my example photo above, the exported time is 5h 45m 53 s, but the total time is 29 h 43 m 20s. This exported time is missing on the export is 23 hours, 53 minutes, and 27 seconds - almost exactly 24 hours. iMovie deletes 24 hours of time then applies the remaining time, the 5h 45m 53 s in my case, to the start of the exported video. It then ignore the last ~24 hours of the video.

To solve this issue, you need to read this next section called "Video Splitting for Export".

Alright. So the last thing I tried there, the part with uploading to YouTube, did fail as anticipated. However, I have discovered that the compressed file has sound! This is an interesting thing to me. That means the original still has sound files embedded into it, but they are not being used properly. It is important to note that the file was converted with HandBrake from a .mov file to a .mp4 file. I had seen this worked on the internet, but now I can confirm that properly converting an iMovie file to .mp4 does in fact fix it's audio issue.

So I moved on the next method. YouTube has a feature where you can live stream. I happen to have OBS for Mac on my computer, a recording software, and it is capable of creating live streams for YouTube using a thing called a stream key. Essentially, this allows OBS (or whatever capable program you have) to upload whatever it is recording directly to YouTube. YouTube is able to process the stream and dispense it to all your viewers for you. You only provide the source material and YouTube handles the rest. Now, there is also a neat feature where YouTube will save a recording of the video to your channel. This means you can show it for playback at a later date instead of only right during the live stream. This is where things get interesting for my case here.

So I read in a lot of different forums and suchlike, none of which were the official YouTube forum, that you could get really long videos onto YouTube (over 12 hours) by live streaming the entire thing. Since YouTube saves the entire stream to your channel, you effectively bypass the 12 hour time limit and get the video onto your channel. I figured it was worth a go.

I waited until I could ditch my computer for about 30 hours straight, figured out how to live stream on my computer (which is loads easier said than done due to processing power speed limits), and booted it up. I am very happy to tell you that my entire video, excluding maybe the last 2 minutes or so of credits for the game, has been successfully live streamed. So, in that regard, I have succeeded in at least getting it onto YouTube in one way or another. As of a few minutes ago I checked the recorded version on my channel.

To my delight, there was in fact a saved version of my video there. I clicked it. It shows up, but says "This live stream recording is not available." Now this has me thinking that this video is pretty much done. I do not think YouTube will ever release it as a video on my channel due to this message. But in the rare case that they do, it will be under the link below. (This video is an M rated video game called The Last of Us Part II. Please see the ratings for this game before proceeding. It is limited to 18+ years of age. Viewer discretion is advised.)

https://youtu.be/Go_yq1J9dmM YouTube link for this crazy 30 hour long video, which may not be operational.

With that, I think I am finally going to put this video and thread series to rest. I have done all I can to get it up and running on YouTube. The video itself still exists on my computer, with sound, and is fully operational. If I ever find something new that solves more problems related to this, I will let you know, but I am no longer going to actively look for solutions as I have been.

Thank you all, especially Rich839, for helping me get this insane task to work. Without all of your help, this video would have never even made it off of iMovie.

Stay frosty,

~Turtledud3

I did not find the maximum file size. I actually have not yet confirmed that YouTube will not except the 30 hour video, only that it failed to process it. I have my doubts that it will ever accept the length or size of the video. If it does, I still have doubts that it will be able to properly process it.

Alright. I give. I have tried many solutions to the YouTube issue. It seems YouTube is not going to process the video, as expected. It was still worth the shot though. This guide still works as far as getting the information off of iMovie though.

I got the classic 95% complete "Processing abandoned. Video is too long." That means that YouTube will not process the video length, as originally expected. This does not, however, answer my question of how the other fellow on YouTube managed to upload that 20 hour long video without running into the same issue.