How Do You Split Footage Clips in IMovie Event Library?

You can drag clips into new Events, or split them by holding down CTRL key click where you want to split. On the pop-up menu choose Split Event before Clip. That will create a new event with a no. 1 appended to the end of the name to prevent it from duplicating the name. Or choose split clip at the playhead. That might make more sense if you are trying to chop-up takes within an Event.

The method of deleting a small clip in between where you want to split will work, but I do not like it because it is destructive, and it takes a long time because of the way iMovie does it.

The way I would do it is to use MPEG Streamclip, which is a free download from Squared 5.

In iMovie, right-click on your Event clip. Select "Reveal in Finder". Drag this Finder clip to MPEG Streamclip.

In MPEG Streamclip, type move the playhead to the "In" point of your desired clip, and type I to set the in. Then move the playhead to the "Out" point of your clip and type O to set the Out. Then FILE/EXPORT USING QUICKTIME and select the current codec.

This should give you a new clip without any transcoding. Repeat as many times as necessary to split into as many clips as you need.

Now, you can import these clips into imovie through FILE/IMPORT...MOVIE/from file. You can put them in separate Events if you like.

Hint: If you want iMovie to place your Event in the proper month and year, name your new clip clip-yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss.ext, where hh is hours in 24 hour time, and let ext be provided by MPEG Streamclip. It should be the same as the current extension (e.g. .mov, .dv., etc.)

Once you have imported the split clips into imovie, you can delete the original Event.

This method works well, and is much faster than doing it in iMovie. I do this when I capture a VHS tape and it comes in as one long clip. I use this method to split it into logical clips.

AppleMan1958 is right, you want to log your footage and split it into takes outside of iMovie. It's not good at what you are trying to do with it. And I learned quite a few new things about MPEG Streamclip. Thanks AppleMan!

I think I have a typo in my answer.

It needs to be clip-yyyy-mm-dd hh;mm;ss.ext.

semicolons, not colons.

Split Event before clip might only show up if you first hold down the CTRL key, then click in the Event Browser window where you want to divide that folder up. It will be one of the options in the pop-up menu when you CTRL-click:

And you are absolutely correct, selecting a range of seconds within a clip and dragging into another event folder moves the whole darned thing. It won't take just the part you want and divide it out. iMovie doesn't let you divde Events into a 'bin' where you can trim down clips into individual 'takes' from a longer reel of video that you shot. There's just no way to trick it into doing what you want it to do. AppleMan1958's suggestion of using the free program MPEG Streamclip seems like a much more sure way of being able to divide your raw unedited video into individual takes that can be brought into an Final Cut Pro Media Bin for further editing. iMovie was never intended to be a logging program for video that then gets ingested into FCP unfortunately.

Split Event Before Selected Clip is only an option if you have more than one clip in the Event, AND if you select something other than the first clip.

This command puts all clips before the selected clip in one event, and all clips from the selected clip on into another event. This command will not help you if you have one long clip.