iMovie Library file GIGANTIC (67GB) and DV files also gigantic ... convert DV files first?

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Barb2019 Author

Level 1

8 points

iMovie Library file GIGANTIC (67GB) and DV files also gigantic ... convert DV files first?

I'm back at my home video project, wherein I converted 2 hour videotapes from our camcorder to DV files stored on an external drive. Each DV file is 26 to 28 GB in size. My iMovie project is to cut these 2 hour movies into smaller clips and share them with family.

I've only done about five of these so far, totalling maybe an hour, and noticed that the iMovie Library file keeps growing with each project. The library file is now 67GB. At this rate, my hard drive will be completely filled up in no time.

Am I supposed to convert the DV files into some other file format before I use them to create iMovie projects, and if so, what file format? There seem to be dozens of formats, so not sure what to pick. I've managed to share these few little videos on our family Youtube channel, so that's where they're going to end up, hopefully.

Also, there's no scene detection tool in iMovie 10, right? I'm trialling commercial software that does that, but it breaks a two hour video into a hundred or more pieces, so not sure how useful that's going to be...

I was hoping to do all this without having to get a degree in video editing! 😣

Thanks in advance.

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Dec 30, 2020 4:04 PM

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Answer 1

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Rich839

Level 8

48,156 points

Dec 30, 2020 4:32 PM in response to Barb2019

Hi, Barb2019,

DV files have low compression, so they are larger and consume more space. You could convert the DV footage to the more highly compressed (and smaller files) Mp4/AAC format for editing in iMovie. Mp4 is considered a delivery or viewing format rather than an editing format. However, I have found that it edits just fine in iMovie. You wouldn't need editing formats like DV or pro res unless you were doing some very precision editing on a frame by frame basis. Or possibly were working with very high action footage like an auto racing video.

Handbrake is a free download that is a very good video converter. You can get Handbrake here:

https://handbrake.fr/

A simple way to do it is to open Handbrake and do a File/Open Source. Navigate to your video clip on your desktop and choose it as the source from the resulting screen. Then do File/Start Encoding. Wait a couple of minutes for the conversion to complete. Then save and import the converted clip into iMovie. It should work fine. Or you could fiddle with the settings rather than rely on the default, that would be Mp4. I would select a constant rather than variable frame rate.

That being said, as you continue to add more media to make movies there is no way to avoid an increase in your iMovie library size, resulting in more space consumed on the drive where the library is located. Every clip that you load into iMovie goes into the iMovie library and is stored in an Original Media folder that is a Finder folder located on your hard drive. Rather than fighting with file sizes and formats the better solution is to store your iMovie library on an external drive so that the files imported into it are stored there instead of in your internal drive. The external drive should be formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Reformatting erases all data on the drive, so first back up any data that you want to keep.

-- Rich

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iMovie Library file GIGANTIC (67GB) and DV files also gigantic ... convert DV files first?

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