Currently I have video clips in itunes, iphoto, movies folder, imovie, imovieHD... probably some duplicates, How can I clean this up?
Mac OS X (10.6.7)
The answer seems fairly obvious: move them to where you want them! 🙂
yes, it does seem obvious but bear with me: the obvious home for music is itunes, for photos it's iphoto, for docs it's the documents folder. But movies (home videos) not so much. They import into iphoto and it's nice to have thumbnails for them, but when you work in imovie it then duplicates everything. Imovie isnt' designed to hold everything in a database, rather just use footage as reference and discard what you don't end up putting in the project. And if you put it in folders in the finder it's a drag because you have to manually move it out of iphoto after each import and there are no thumbnails for easy browsing. What do you do? Sorry, I am a beginner.
No, you can't store them in iMovie, but you should store them in your Movies Folder.
iPhoto and iTunes are basically databases, where you store the material in a library (database file). iMovie is an application to edit movie footage in prior to sending the project to iDVD.
I have all my movies stored on an external hard drive, with an alias to each of them in the Movies Folder on my startup drive. That way Front Row can find them.
Yeah, this is frustrating for me, too. I tried a few different variants: keeping everything in Aperture, keeping only videos in iPhoto, keeping videos in Movies folder, etc. Reason being I'd like to be able to sync some videos back to the iPhone will keeping access available for iMovie - which is tougher than it should be. Now that the iPhone does HD videos, Apple needs to either adjust iPhoto to work with videos better or work with iMovie to actually function as a movie database as well as editor.
For now, I, too, have my stuff strewn about on my Mac but I'm trying to consolidate as much as I can into iMovie events on an external drive. I have a bunch of video clips of my 2 year old and I've decided to just group them by year and then put together an edit of each to then put into iTunes so I can view them on AppleTV as well as sync to my iPhone. I figure I won't ever sit down and watch every single clip so I might as well put together the "highlights".
I find myself in a similar situation: whatever I import from my camcorder comes into iMovie events, so in essence it's acting as a database for me too, which I gather from your and Klaus' answer I shouldn't be doing. I have found no other way to import from my camcorder into my computer except through iMovie. But whatever I import from my iphone or point-and-shoot comes in through iPhoto and gets stored there. so when time comes to make a movie, the footage is not all in one place and it's hard to establish chronology. Another issue is, If I store all my clips in the Movies Folder and then bring them into iMovie for editing, i'd be duplicating and taking up tons of space though, right? I have them all in an external drive too, which makes working a bit slower also. Not sure how to create an alias on my startup drive. Thank you both for your replies.
I find myself in a similar situation: whatever I import from my camcorder comes into iMovie events, so in essence it's acting as a database for me too, which I gather from your and Klaus' answer I shouldn't be doing. I have found no other way to import from my camcorder into my computer except through iMovie. But whatever I import from my iphone or point-and-shoot comes in through iPhoto and gets stored there. so when time comes to make a movie, the footage is not all in one place and it's hard to establish chronology. Another issue is, If I store all my clips in the Movies Folder and then bring them into iMovie for editing, i'd be duplicating and taking up tons of space though, right? I have them all in an external drive too, which makes working a bit slower also. Not sure how to create an alias on my startup drive. Thank you both for your replies.
Correct, if you import to a folder and then want to use the footage in iMovie, you will need to duplicate it in iMovie as an Event.
I wouldn't say that you shouldn't import your footage directly to iMovie; that is what I do now unless they are really short clips (in which case they go to a simple folder in /Movies). Again, for the simple fact alone that the iPhone/Touch is being used more and more by every day people to record video, Apple will be forced to do something to help users store and catalog video in a more functional way.
I'm beginning to warm up to using iMovie as a database but I've also had to tell myself that I need to actually edit and put together projects for the long-term. Otherwise, I'll have hundreds if not thousands of video clips - which is really not productive.
How can I store my video footage in one library? Currently I have video clips in itunes, iphoto, movies folder, imovie, imovieHD... probably some duplicates, How can I clean this up?
