What Does Finalize Project Do? iMovie 11

Yes. The movies will appear in the Media Browser of iDVD.

Correct.

Finalized movies are built into the iMovie project container and appear in the media browser. They're in the standard formats use by the Share menu. When you export to QuickTime the media file is in whatever format you choose and can be located wherever you want.

I'm new to imovie, can you tell me, is it necessary to "finalize" if my only goal is to save the movie to a dvd. My mac is telling me that finalizing will take more than five hours, thus, for that one reason, I would love to avoid finalizing if I don't need to finalize. thanks,

David

If all you want to do is a DVD, use the SHARE Menu to Share/to Media Browser in Large size. Then you can drag the movie in from the Media Browser in iDVD.

Alternatively, SHARE/MOVIE in Large size, and give it a name and location. Drag this movie into iDVD.

Do you have a sense of how long those two approaches might take. And, is there a difference in video quality, stability, anything else that might matter to viewers of the movie on dvd, between doing it in the ways you suggest, and, on the other hand, finalizing it.

Thanks

These two approaches (Media Browser, or Share/Movie) will both take the same amount of time. The difference is if you want to have Apple manage where the resulting file is stored, or do you want to place it somewhere you can find it.

Both of the above will be shorter than Finalize, because you will not be rendering the sizes you do not need.

Hi.

I have edited my movie in iMovie 09 and selected Share > Export Movie > (HD option).

I left it overnight to encode and could see that it has certainly done something as 8.5gb of hard drive space had been used, but I couldn't for the life of me find the file. After reading that Share > Media Browser is a better option for various reasons I selected this and left it to encode while I went to work.

I have returned home, and again can see that another 8.5gb of hd space has been used, however I still can not find the output file, and when I go into iDVD the movie does not appear in the selecable media box on the right (It still instructs me to select Share > Media Browser).

Based on the info above the files should appear embedded in the User > Movies > folder.

When I open the package contents and show the file info of the embedded 'movies' folder it is indeed large (over 17gb as expected after 2 x exports), however the file info says that it contains zero files (refer attached image), and I can not see any files in the folder despite it being 17gig in size.

How is this possible, and what can I do to access the exported files? It takes over 4 hrs to render each time so I don't want to be messing about....

Thanks in advance.

hey guys i have a question , im using the canon vixia hf20 to record videos while im playing ps3 games on my tv then i upload them to imovie 11 then to youtube , they are supposed to be in HD but the quality of the videos is very bad , crappy , choppy , i dont know what im doing wrong , can somebody help me ? even my cell phone camera upload better quality videos lol , oh 1 more thing i can see a lot of black lines on the video , why is that ?

@WazzaB i have the same problem, i see it eating up hdd space but i can't find the video file it created. i don't get it, i specified the file to be put on the Desktop so i could find it easily but when it was done after 17 hours there was no file to be found.

Have you found a solution?

Finalized files are stored in the project package. These files are accessible from other application's media browsers, such as GarageBand. To get to the finalized files right-click on the project file and select Show Package Contents. Inside is a folder called Movies. That's where the finalized movie files live.

Tom, the movie was exported several times but the project package remained around 85MB.

When i check inside the package, theres no finalized movie.

Exporting is not finalizing. Finalize is in the File menu and is a separate function. I answered in the wrong thread and attached to the wrong message.

yes...well, not finalize. But you are able to Share> Media Browser in however many sizes you want... including just medium. 😀

I am completely missing this.

I imported 25 clips, added markers (which took about 25x longer than iMovie HD) and want to make a DVD. It says 7 hours to finalize. Why is there any of this?...why isn't it just going to iDVD as it did with iMovie HD? I've even tried pubish to media browser/medium.

Why 7 hours .. why any hours ?

AppleMan1958 wrote:

Finalize Project will render your project in all sizes available. This may take some time, so you may want to do it overnight or while you are away from the computer. Once you have done it, you can share to iTunes, MobileMe, FaceBook, YouTube, etc, and you only have to worry about the network time. It does not have to render again.

Thank for that information. I tried but where all files in deferrent sizes?

Cheers

When you Finalize the Project, will iMovie turn it into a proper movie with a set format such as .avi, or .mp4, etc?