Can I save my movie projects to an external hard drive?

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Level 1

13 points

Can I save my movie projects to an external hard drive?

I am an elementary music teacher and often make DVDs of my students' performances. This is maxxing out my hard drive on my Mac. I have an external hard drive with a lot of memory, so my question is: can I somehow put iMovie projects onto the external hard drive, to free up memory on the Mac's hard drive? If so, how do I go about doing this? Conversely, would this be a bad idea, and if that is the case, could I move iTunes (also have a ton of music, as you can imagine) or iDVD to the external hard drive? Or iPhotos?

I'm not high-tech savvy, so need help in simple English, please.

Thanks so much!!!

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8), also have iMovie and iDVD

Posted on May 5, 2012 7:16 AM

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Answer 1

May 5, 2012 7:36 AM in response to iteachmusic

Hi

Yes - BUT there are Must's and Should's

• external Hard Disk - MUST be - Mac OS Extended (hfs) formatted - UNIX/DOS/FAT32/Mac OS Exchange works for most other things BUT NOT FOR VIDEO whatever program used iMovie or FinalCut.

• If You want to save space - You must Copy Project With Event's as Projects are very small text documents conducting/directing how Events are to be played to look like a Movie. There is no Movie in Projects

• Should use a FireWire hard disk - As USB/USB2 performs badly to me especially when filling up.

Yours Bengt W

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Answer 2

iteachmusic Author

Level 1

13 points

May 5, 2012 7:53 AM in response to Bengt Wärleby

I am sure that this would solve the problem, but I do not understand how to accomplish any of this. I teach k-5 music and am not tech savvy at all, so need a step by step, and a "where to find this" on the computer, in order to accomplish.

Thanks for the quick response, though.

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Answer 3

May 5, 2012 10:51 AM in response to iteachmusic

Within the project library of iMovie you should see your external drive listed along with the projects stored on your mac. To copy a project you simply drag the project from its current position to your external drive. You will then get the option of copying just the project or project and events. As Bengt rightly states you should copy both project and Events. If you hold down the alt key as you drag the project you will get the option of moving rather than copying. I would NOT recommend doing this in case there are problems during the copying/moving process (I don't find iMovie to be the most stable of apps) and you might find the original project has been deleted without properly copying it across. Better to copy to the external drive, check it works ok and then delete original.

Hope this helps.

Russ

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